With the advance of technology, the range for artistic endeavors also widens: new art forms are invented, existing forms are augmented by new techniques. Humans, of course, remain central, for it’s they who must interpret and use the new artistries.
Lee Killough, whose novels include A Voice Out of Ram ah and The Doppelganger Gambit, writes of anomalies and dangers in one new art form, in this colorful novelette set in her future artists’ colony of the Aventine.
* * * *
On gray days, when the clouds hang in heavy pewter folds and the wind comes down cold and sharp as a blade, I think of Brian Eleazar. We stand facing each other in the sand garden, surrounded by the elaborate and alien patterns of rock outcroppings in a score of minerals and dunes of a dozen different colored sands. The sand underfoot is fine and white as sugar over a deeper layer of red. Across it, between us, a trail of footprints shows scarlet, as though they were stepped in blood.
Gateside was still thawing out from winter when I arrived at the Blue Orion Theater to join the cast of Zachary Weigand’s new play. Leaden clouds shrouded Diana Mountain, hiding the stargate above the city. The wind blowing over the remaining traces of snow and ice left me shivering, despite the efforts of my coat, which fluffed itself and clung to me like a frightened cat. For as long as it took me to pay the cabdriver and hurry across the sidewalk into the theater, I thought with regret of the movie I had turned down to take this part. It was being made in southern Italy, where the sky was almost certainly clear and the sun shining.
As I pushed through the doors into the Blue Orion, a guard came out of his station, ready to turn back anyone who did not belong here. “May I help—” He broke off, a smile of recognition spreading across his face. “It’s you, Miss Delacour. Mr. Eleazar said you’d be coming. Congratulations on the Tony nomination for Silent Thunder. I hope you win. Are you going to play Simone in the movie, too?”
I smiled back at him. “If my agent has any influence at all I will.”
“I’ll keep my fingers crossed. Before you go in, may I have your autograph?”
He brought a book from his station. I took it and thumbed through looking for a place to sign. I would be in Olympian company, I saw. The pages already signed carried the signatures of the theater’s greatest, personalities like Lillith Mannors, Eden Lyle, Walter Fontaine, and Maya Chaplain. I found a new page and signed it in a precise hand with ornate capitals: Noir Delacour.
It reminded me why I was here instead of in southern Italy. Zach Weigand’s name on a script was enough to fill a theater opening night, but when it was accompanied by that of Brian Eleazar, who had directed in almost every medium in his career and earned himself a shelf of Tonys and Oscars to prove how competent he was at it, the play was sure to draw the attention and acclaim of every major critic. The Sand Garden had the additional attraction of being a théâre vérité production. Improvisation and scriptless drama had become very fashionable in the past few years, but théâtre vérité was the most popular. It was playing to huge, enthusiastic audiences all over the world.
And of course I could not overlook the fact that Brian Eleazar had asked me to be Allegra Nightengale.
“He was almost on his knees begging for you, pet,” my agent said when he relayed the offer.
However histrionic he sounds, Karol Gardener rarely exaggerates. There was no real agony over which contract to sign, then. It meant a great deal when a director of Brian’s stature begged for a particular actress. The director of the movie had not begged.
I returned the guard’s autograph book. “Can you tell me where Mr. Eleazar is?”
“He’s onstage with the rest of the cast. Go right on through there.”
Warmth was seeping back into me. My coat loosened its grip on my arms and chest as the heat soothed and settled it. I could also feel my hair loosening from the hairpins. To the despair of hairdressers everywhere, it has the texture of quicksilver. I did not need a look in the lobby minors to know the wind outside had ruined thirty minutes of Raoul’s best efforts. I pulled out the hairpins and let the whole pale, slithery mass fall free down my back as I went into the auditorium.
I love theaters. Full ones are best, of course, but I have a special fondness for empty ones. I love the sensation of hearing the ghosts of a thousand past performances still whispering in the musty silence, and of feeling the magic of performances yet to come waiting in golden expectation.
I listened to the ghosts as I made my way down the sloping aisle toward the stage in the center. Halfway down, though, I switched my attention to the three men standing in the pool of light onstage. Two were familiar faces. I had worked with both before. Tommy Sebastian’s classic profile and lamb’s-wool curls looked copied from a Grecian vase. With the help of cosmetisculptor surgeons, they probably had been. In contrast to Tommy’s beauty, Miles Reed’s face was so unremarkable it disappeared instantly from memory. He hardly existed as a person offstage. Miles was a blank canvas on which he painted every role with a new and different brush. I noticed he had shaved his head for this part.
The third man must be Brian Eleazar. He was smaller than I had expected. His head reached barely higher than Tommy’s shoulder, but he radiated a presence I felt even from where I was. Above the turtleneck of his sweater, the craggy irregularity of his face, which the gossip columnists liked to describe as “Lincolnesque,” had a compelling magnetism.
I had reached the stage without any of them noticing me. I made my presence known. “Good afternoon, gentlemen.”
They turned. Miles shaded his eyes to peer past the lights. He grinned. “Noir.” He came over to offer me a hand up the steps. “Congratulations on the Tony nomination.”
Even Miles’s voice was subject to change. Last time we met, it had been deep and rich. Today it was a sibilant hiss.
Tommy blew me a kiss. “Darling. ‘She walks in beauty, like the night.’”
I squeezed Miles’s hand in thanks before I let go and looked past him to lift a brow at Tommy. “That’s nice, but do you ever learn more than the quotable bits?”
Tommy grinned, unabashed. ‘That’s all it takes to impress most people.”
Brian Eleazar nodded to me. “Good afternoon, Miss Delacour.” His voice was unexpectedly deep, rumbling up from the depths of his chest.
I smiled at him. “I’m delighted to be here. I’ve been looking forward to working with you.”
I extended my hand. He managed to ignore it and I pulled it back, feeling annoyed and foolish. Once Brian had been legend for romancing his leading ladies. That had ended when Pia Fisher became a fixture in his life, and apparently her influence remained even though it had been a year since her death. After a few minutes, amusement at my own reactions overcame the annoyance and disappointment of being held so clearly at a distance. Only then did I discover that Brian’s cinnamon-colored eyes were fixed on me with searching intensity.
Before I could examine that expression, he turned away to four chairs in the middle of the stage. “Now that we’re all here, shall we begin?”
A thin loose-leaf notebook lay on each chair: our playbooks. I found the one with “Allegra Nightengale” printed on the cover and sat down. The playbook would not be a script, of course; théâtre vérité uses no scripts. The notebook contained the biographical history of Allegra Nightengale.
The biography is what makes théâtre vérité unique. Instead of merely ad-libbing from an opening situation, as in most improvisation, or playing roles, as in conventional drama, actors in vérité learn the histories of their characters, absorb them until they know how the characters will think and feel and react to any given situation. Then, with an angel’s help, they become the characters. The action of the play emerges from the natural response of the characters to each other.
And because many factors can affect a response—a variation in another’s tone or inflection, a distracting sound, the normal day-to-day difference in outlook—no two performances are ever quite alike. There have been numerous examples of vérité productions with endings that changed from night to night. The dynamic nature of the form, the limitless possibilities in each new performance, are what brings in the audiences.
I opened the playbook. The first page was a scenario of the opening and a tentative outline of the action. Authors have some idea what they want to happen. They design their characters to produce personalities that will react in the desired manner. They also hedge their bets by stating their expectations. No matter how involved the actors become in their characters, then, the professional subconscious steers a course in the right general direction toward a satisfactory climax.
“Read over the outline and opening scenario, please,” Brian said.
I had seen the outline before in Karol Gardener’s office when I signed the contract, but I read it again. Brian paced while we did so, and on every turn I felt his cinnamon eyes come back to me.
Allegra Nightengale and Jonathan Clay were lovers, the sun, moon, and stars to each other. Jonathan was also a speculator. He had an option to buy a cargo brought back by an exploration team from a planet the stargate had touched once and lost. Because the planet had no receiving gate, reestablishing contact with it was virtually impossible. That made the cargo priceless. Jonathan went to a Shissahn living on Earth for financial backing. Hakon Chashakananda was a careful businessman and demanded some security to insure the return of his loan. The opening scenario had Hakon, played by Miles, telling Jonathan, Tommy, to leave Allegra with him as a hostage until the cargo was sold and profits distributed.
I went on to the plot outline. If Zach Weigand had tailored Jonathan’s character correctly, Jonathan would agree to the arrangement. Allegra would also agree, out of her love for Jonathan. She would be repelled by the alien, because of both his inhuman appearance and his demand for a hostage, but gradually she would find aspects of him to admire. He would be drawn to her in turn and eventually release her. On returning to Jonathan, however, Allegra would find herself looking at him with new eyes. She would find flaws in him she could not accept, and she would leave this once-beloved man of her own kind to return to the alien.
“All right,” Brian said. “Study the bios tonight and start learning your characters. Do you all have your angels?”
Miles and I nodded. Tommy shook his head. Brian handed him a vial of minute white pills. “Don’t take more than one. I don’t want you to settle in too deep. Tomorrow we’ll begin scenarios and bio alterations as necessary. I shouldn’t need to, but I remind you not to discuss your bios with each other.”
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.”
Miles headed for the door, smiling at me in passing. It was a tired product. “Have fun.”
Brian resumed pacing. “Tommy is playing Jonathan Clay, not being Jonathan Clay.”
“I’m doing what I always do. Giles Kimner didn’t complain in Rainbow Man.”
“I’m not Giles Kimner, as I pointed out before.” Brian’s voice remained even, but every syllable crackled like breaking ice. “I do not believe one can produce valid théâtre vérité by playing characters. Jonathan Clay has depth. He has layers of feeling and behavior. If he didn’t, Allegra would have realized what he was long ago. He has to be done as more than a veneer over your own facade.”
“I’m doing what I always do.” Tommy followed his rising voice until he was standing, glaring down at Brian, only centimeters from the director’s face. “You’ve seen me work before. You know what I do. If you don’t like it, why the hell did you come asking me to be Jonathan!” He whirled away and kicked his chair.
The chair collapsed and skidded across the polished floor.
“Very good,” Brian said.
I blinked. He sounded delighted.
“I’ve got you feeling real emotion now. Before, you’ve just played at it, as you’ve just played at vérité. You’ve never bothered to learn how to work with angels, only waited for them to do the job for you. I’ll teach you how to use them, though, with Noir’s help. You are Jonathan. I want you to be him onstage for the whole world. Noir.” He turned and looked at me. “What I’ll do is set up scenarios for the two of you, and you’ll live as many as necessary for as long as you need to, until Jonathan becomes real to you and us.”
We swallowed our angels and started to work. After the first hour I could see why Miles had been exhausted. Even with angels, remaining Allegra and seeing Tommy as Jonathan was an effort when the words and reactions coming from him were all Tommy Sebastian. Though we had never worked in a verite production together before, I knew Tommy had done several. I wondered how. I also wondered why Brian wanted him for Jonathan. There were plenty of more gifted actors with profiles just as beautiful as Tommy’s.
We must have lived nearly fifteen repeats of the party where Jonathan and Allegra first met, and that was only one of seven scenarios Brian had chosen for us. When Brian finally let us quit, it was nearly dark outside. I was too tired even to eat I took a cab back to my hotel and collapsed into bed.
* * * *
The next day was a repeat of the previous afternoon. Brian let me take short breaks to choose my costumes and be fitted for the alterations while he worked Tommy with Miles, but most of the scenarios were between Jonathan and Allegra. It was wearing, and wearying. I stayed in character for so long I started to feel that Allegra owned my body and Noir was someone who lived in the back of my head. The blitz worked, though. Somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, Tommy visibly changed. I found myself talking to someone unmistakably Jonathan Clay. The easy chatter and poetic quotes disappeared, replaced by warm, adoring eyes that said more than words and lingered on me wherever I went. Finishing the scene, we came out of the angel mist and were actually startled to find Brian there.
He measured us with his eyes, nodding. “He’s got it.” He grabbed me and danced me across the practice hall. “By Jove, I think he’s got it.”
I started to pull away. I did not want any man touching me but Jonathan. Moments later I recognized the carry-over. I grinned sheepishly and relaxed in Brian’s arms. “Does he have it or does it have us?”
Brian did not reply. His head was turned, watching our whirling reflections in the mirrors. No, I saw a moment later, not our reflections; he was watching Tommy.
Tommy preened himself, grinning. “You should be dancing with me, Brian; I’m the one who’s done something marvelous.”
Abruptly, Brian let me go. A frown rippled across his forehead. He ran back toward Tommy. “No, don’t quit; don’t lose it again. Let me work with you on some other scenes and we’ll zip you into Jonathan once and for all. Thank you, Noir,” he called back to me. “We’d never have done it without you. You’re through for the day.”
I picked up my coat and escaped before he could change his mind. I treated myself to a long walk to clear Allegra and the angel mist out of my head. I needed it. I kept finding myself looking in shop windows at dresses that, while beautiful, were not my style. When I felt like Noir again, I took a cab back to the hotel and soaked in the tub, reading a book. I was debating whether I wanted to bother dressing to go down to the hotel dining room or have room service bring something up when the phone rang.
It was Tommy. “How would you feel about having dinner with me tonight?” His voice was quiet, without its usual flippancy.
“Has Brian given permission?”
There was a pause. “Of course not, but our characters are supposed to know and enjoy each other’s company. Please, Allegra?”
I frowned. “Don’t try that on me, Tommy Sebastian.” Even as I said it, though, I could feel Allegra nudging me, responding to Jonathan’s voice. I fought a minute, then gave in. Why not? What was the harm? “Pick me up in half an hour.”
He knocked on my door in exactly half an hour. I shook my watch in disbelief. Tommy on time? But he was, and he looked me over with approval. “Lovely.” He squeezed my hand as he tucked it under his arm and led me toward the elevators. “I thought we’d eat at The Caverns.”
That was fine with me. We chatted while we waited for the elevator and I noticed that he did not once check his reflection in the mirrored wall. In The Caverns, which was paradoxically on the top floor of the hotel, he continued to be attentive while we sat on a stalagmite-supported bench seat at a stalagmite-supported table beneath dim stalactite lamps.
“I thank you for the dinner,” I said, “even though I’m having it with Jonathan Clay and not Tommy Sebastian.”
Tommy rubbed his forehead. “I’m sorry, but I can’t seem to shake him off.”
“I can sympathize.” I leaned my head against his shoulder. “How did the rest of the afternoon go?”
“More of the same. Well, not quite. Brian made some changes in my —in Jonathan’s bio, then he put me through the hoops with the changes. Would you like to take a walk after dinner?”
I would. We did. Hand in hand, we strolled down Gateside Avenue. The clouds that had been drooping overhead the past two days were gone. Through the clear, crisp night we could see the towering bulk of Diana Mountain and, high on it, the lights of the buildings housing the stargate.
“I always thought there should be a shining arch filled with stars,” I said, “not just flat, dull buildings.”
Tommy squeezed my hand. “Why, you’re a romantic.”
I thought about it. “Allegra is.”
The stargate and the international jetport put Gateside on a crossroads of the galaxy. The avenue was lined with shops whose brightly lighted show windows displayed the products of a hundred worlds. We examined fabrics, gems, artworks. In one window stood an intricate painting made by pouring colored sands into the narrow space between two sheets of glass.
I pointed to it. “Isn’t that from Shissah?”
Tommy peered at the tag just visible under the edge of the glass. “Yes. Would you like it? I’ll come back tomorrow and buy it for you.”
I stared at him. “You really are stuck in Jonathan’s skin, aren’t you? Snap out of it, Tommy.”
He shook his head like someone dazed. ‘This is weird. I know I’ve got just Jonathan’s personality, not his money, but for a minute there I was thinking I could write a check for that sand painting, no matter what it cost.”
I nodded. “There can be a lot of carry-over when the character resonates with your own, or when it’s the first time or two in deep involvement. What’s the matter?”
Tommy was shivering. “I wonder if this is how Pia felt.”
“Pia Fisher?”
He leaned his forehead against a window. “Rainbow Man was her first part in a vérité production. If I’d understood then what that meant, I would have made sure she knew what she was doing going into the water.”
The skin on my back prickled. “You were with her the day she died?”
He stared broodingly in at a bright collection of fabrics in the window. “I was doing Adoni in the show. We had a free afternoon. I rented a car and talked her into coming for a drive with me. She’d been shut up for days on end, never going anywhere except to the theater, just waiting for Brian to call her during breaks in that movie he was directing in Africa. We stopped for a walk on the beach. She started pulling off her clothes and daring me to a race around the point I’m not a strong swimmer, so I told her I’d drive around and meet her on the far side.” He bit his lip. “She never got there.” He turned so his back was slumped against the window. “I didn’t know she couldn’t swim at all. I never thought to ask her if she knew what she was doing.”
Of course he hadn’t. It was not Tommy’s nature to question people’s actions. He would have waved to her as she waded into the warm Hawaiian ocean, then merrily driven off to meet her on the far side of the point.
“You know,” he said, “I feel worse about it now than I ever have before. In fact, I’d almost forgotten about being there until just now.”
I took his hand. “You couldn’t have known how much of her was carry-over. Come on. We haven’t finished our walk.”
We were ourselves the rest of the way down the avenue and back Pia had dissipated the last of the angels’ effects. We were subdued, though. Not even Tommy could find his usual light humor. When we reached the hotel, he left me in the lobby without once extolling his virtues as a night-long guest.
* * * *
He was still quieter than usual at the theater the next day. I wondered if I should be concerned, but Brian was obviously pleased. “Jonathan is coming very well. Tommy, I want you and Miles to work together this morning. I have some errands to run, but I think you’re capable of working by yourselves. Do some early meetings between Jonathan and Hakon.”
Tommy’s eyes were on me. “Can’t I work with Noir?”
“Later. Here comes Miles.” He repeated his instructions to Miles, then picked up his coat and started for the door. “Noir, will you walk to the street with me, please?”
Leaving, I saw Tommy’s face. He looked displeased.
Brian was a fast walker. I had to stretch my legs to keep up. “Is there something you want me to do?”
“Yes. Button your coat and come with me.”
I raised brows at him. “What?”
“I have to go over to Aventine. You’ve been working hard and deserve a little bit of holiday.” His hand was under my elbow, urging me forward. “A cabletrain leaves from here in fifteen minutes. We just have time to make it if we hurry.”
I stopped. I would love to see Aventine. That retreat of the rich and famous was legendary, but ... by cabletrain?
He pulled me forward again. “It’s so high you’ll lose the sensation of height, I promise you. You’ll enjoy the trip.”
I let myself be dragged with him. “How did you know I was afraid of heights?”
He shrugged. “I suppose I heard it somewhere. Come on.”
Aventine. The name had a magic ring. Why not? “All right.”
The hour’s ride on the cabletrain was not as bad as I feared. With Brian holding tight to my hand, I allowed myself to be talked into looking out the windows. The mountainside fell away hundreds of meters below us, a patchwork of melting snow and new spring green. As Brian promised, there was no sensation of being up. The scene could have been a projection wall mere centimeters below the bottom of the train. Brian offered to take me up to the observation platform where coin-operated binoculars let passengers who cared to, take a close look at the bear fishing in the streams below and the deer grazing in the meadows. I declined. The sway of the train was enough to remind me we were suspended over this chasm on just a cable. I felt more secure sitting down.
“What do you have to do in Aventine?” I asked.
“Pick up a prop. Jonathan is a wealthy man with impeccable taste in women and possessions. I thought we should have some first-class art for his office. Xhosar Kain is creating a sonic sculpture just for the play.”
Xhosar Kain? I was impressed. “You’re going after it yourself?”
“Would you trust a Kain piece to a delivery service?”
The conversation lapsed for a few minutes. I looked out the window again. Clouds were starting to move in, some so low they were under the train. I hoped that did not mean the ride back would be minus the scenery. I could feel Brian’s eyes on me, measuring, searching. What was it he was looking for in me?
“What are you doing with your evenings?” he asked.
I could not stop the sudden guilty flush that went up my neck. “Reading, mostly.”
“Not going out with Tommy?”
He knew. His voice was neither accusing nor judgmental, but it was clear the question was rhetorical.
“I did last night.” There was no point in denying it. I looked at him. “Why shouldn’t we? Jonathan and Allegra are lovers. Our togetherness offstage should strengthen the bond onstage.”
The cinnamon eyes were focused past me. “Were you Allegra and Jonathan last night?”
I wished I could read him better. I could not guess how far he intended the question to go. “I reacted to him a bit as Allegra while he was very much Jonathan. He had trouble getting out of the character. He went to his own hotel for the night, however.”
There was a brilliant flash in his eyes. I wondered for a moment if it was anger, but then his face lighted in a smile of satisfaction. “We may make a real actor of him yet.”
Minutes later the cabletrain pulled into the Aventine station. I climbed out, rubbernecking with unashamed curiosity. I found the retreats of the rich and famous were not immediately visible. The station was at the edge of a shopping square. Off it were streets with apartments and studios. Long ago, Aventine had begun as an artists’ colony, and that still dominated its center.
Brian led the way up one of the artists’ streets. He stopped at a studio with a sculpture in front that was an X elaborately wrought in sonic vanes. The wind set it vibrating in a pleasant if repetitious pattern of chords. Brian pushed open the door of the studio.
I am not sure what I expected Xhosar Kain to look like—a bear-like blacksmith, perhaps. I did not expect the thin, twist-spined man who put down his welding torch and mask to come slowly to meet us. The body was frail, but the hand that took mine was large and strong, I noticed, and his eyes were warm.
“Noir Delacour. I’m a great fan of yours.”
“And I of yours. I saw I, the Living when it was on exhibit in New York and felt like I’d had a religious experience.”
He grinned. “You are obviously a woman of outstanding judgment. I’ll love you to my death.” He looked at Brian. “Come after the lady, have you, Eleazar?”
Brian nodded.
“Just a minute.”
He limped into the depths of the studio and came back carrying a small sculpture. Once he set it down I could see it was not all that small, but it was still less massive than most of his work. It was right for a table or desk.
“I call her The Fury. Is she what you had in mind?”
I could see why he called the sculpture “she.” My first reaction was that it was a bird with wings spread to fly, but it could also have been a woman. The rising vanes looked as much like flowing sleeves as wings. The piece was beautiful, and at the same time somehow frightening. The air currents in the studio set it off in a sound that was now a hum and now a keening wail.
Brian touched the edge of a vane with a tentative finger. “It’s just right.”
Kain wrapped the sculpture carefully and laid it in a box. He gave the box to Brian. ‘Watch out for her.”
He followed us to the door of the studio. “Come back and let me do a sonic of you one day, Miss Delacour. It will sing as fair as the angels.”
I promised I would.
Outside, the sky was still lowering. Leaden, waterlogged clouds rolled across the blue, cutting off the sun. The wind was coming up, too, setting off discords in the sculpture in front of the studio. My coat fluffed and tightened around me.
Brian looked up. “It’s no day for sightseeing, after all. Let’s go back to the station.”
The weather changed his mood entirely. Eating lunch at the Gallery Café in Aventine while we waited for the next train, and during the ride back, Brian sat silent, lost in thoughts that looked as brooding as the sky outside. From time to time his cinnamon eyes rested on me or the carton he carried, but for the most part he looked past me, focused on some bleak otherwhere. We were back at the Blue Orion before he could shake free of the mood.
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 trustworthiness. 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?”
There was no mistaking the displeasure in that question. Allegra reached out to touch his hand. “Of course not, but they do have some ideas worth considering. Are you disturbed by that?”
The muscles in his jaw twitched. “What do you think? I’ve spent four months in hell, working as hard as I could to sell off the cargo so I could redeem you. I was scared to death for you. I didn’t have any idea what that creature might be capable of doing. Now you come back singing his praises and spouting alien philosophy. Exactly how friendly have you been with him?”
His implied accusation shocked me. “He’s never touched me. You are my beloved, Jonathan. I have been faithful to you.”
He hugged me fiercely. “Thank God. And now we’re back together again, we can forget this whole incident and continue where we left off.”
We did not, of course. I had been changed by the months with Hakon. I looked at Jonathan through eyes grown a bit alien. I saw things in him I had never seen before, things that deeply disturbed me. When I realized Jonathan was preparing to cheat Hakon out of part of the profit due him, I had to speak out.
Jonathan was brusque. “This is none of your concern.”
“It is. I promised Hakon you were trustworthy. It isn’t right for you to do this.”
His anger was not the flaming kind. Outwardly, he remained calm. His voice stayed level, his face clear, but the muscles twitched in his jaw as I talked and his voice took the tightness of careful control. He refused to discuss his business and ordered me out of the office.
I looked at him in great sorrow. I had been afraid it might come to this. “Very well. I’ll go pack.”
“Pack?” He was on his feet “What do you mean, pack?”
“I’m leaving you.”
He came flying around the desk. “No. You can’t.”
I felt as if I were being torn apart, but I refused to yield to him. I tried to explain how different I felt about things now, how differently I saw. He could not understand.
“I knew there was something between you and that alien.”
I shook my head emphatically. “You’re wrong. Perhaps there could have been, but I remained faithful to you and he respected my choice.”
“Is that so?” His voice was rising. “You think he’s a wonderful man. You bargain in his behalf in business matters that are none of your concern—bargain against me, the man you claim to love. Now you want to leave me. And you expect me to believe it isn’t to go back to him?”
“I expect you to believe that, yes.”
“You’re lying.” He said it through clenched teeth. His hands flexed.
Panic went through me in an icy wash. He was going to hit me! I backed away, feeling helpless and eight years old.
One of his hands drew back, open, poised for a slap. “You’re lying to me. Don’t you dare do that. Admit there was something between you and the alien. Admit it!”
“No, Jonathan.” I tried to back farther, but the desk, that huge, solid desk, blocked my retreat. ‘There was nothing! I swear it!”
In the back of my head, Noir was screaming, too. Jonathan wore the face of my mother’s boyfriend. The hand swung forward. Allegra groped behind her. I needed something to fend him off. My hand closed on the base of the Kain sculpture.
Noir protested, struggling against the angel mist inside me. The play was not supposed to go this way. Allegra should drop the sculpture, should let him hit her once if necessary, and reason lovingly with him. Once I might have, but now Jonathan’s hand was headed toward my face and the terrifying memory of another hand and another man paralyzed me. Noir Delacour should have resumed control, but that same image held me snarled in the angel mist. I swung the sculpture at him.
It slashed across his face. The vanes were like dozens of knives, cutting and tearing through cheeks and nose and eyes. Somewhere beyond the walls of the office, there was a shriek, and the sharp stench of sweat and fear. Jonathan screamed and clawed for me. I swung the sculpture again. This time it crossed his throat.
As he went down I realized what I was doing. I dropped the sculpture and fell on my knees beside him. I tried to stop the bleeding with my hands.
“Jonathan, Jonathan, why did you do this to me? I never wanted to hurt you. I loved you.”
Through the angel mist, Noir watched with dull horror and realized it was supposed to happen this way. It had been orchestrated. Brian had chosen me for Allegra because of my mother’s boyfriend. It was to keep me from stopping Allegra’s panic reaction to Jonathan’s anger. I was not the only one chosen, though. Brian had asked Tommy to be Jonathan . . . poor foolish, irresponsible Tommy. Brian had commissioned the Kain sculpture, so appropriately named after those Grecian instruments of revenge.
Allegra cried, “What are we? I found humanity and compassion in an alien, and monstrosity in my beloved. Even I, for all my pride of being gentle and civilized, become a clawing animal at the first threat of attack.”
Beyond the projection wall the crowd murmured in excitement. The sound came through the angel mist. My head cleared. I looked down at Tommy. He lay slack and still.
The blood delighted the crowd. Suddenly I understood them as I never had before. This was why they loved théâtre vérité, what they really came hoping to see . . . modem Romans at a modern circus.
I looked at my hands, red with Tommy’s blood. “Who are the men, Jonathan, and who the beasts and aliens?”
I huddled over him. I did not look up when the projection wall was shut off. I would not stand to take a bow. Someone picked me up. It was Miles. He kept an arm around me, holding me against his leathery chest while the crowd screamed its pleasure and the stage carried us down out of their sight.
Miles helped me off the stage in the substage area.
Brian pushed through the crowd of gaffers and stagehands to us. “Noir, how terrible, but don’t worry. I’m sure the inquest will find it was an accident, death by misadventure.”
I looked around at him, not letting go of Miles. “What a pity,” I said bitterly. “Then you can’t take proper credit for the most brilliant directing of your career.”
He stared at me one flicker of time, then patted my shoulder. “Poor Noir. You’re upset.”
“What does that matter? Pia is avenged, and that’s what it’s all been about, isn’t it?”
“You’d better take her to her dressing room to lie down, Miles. I’ll call a doctor.”
I let Miles lead me away, but in the doorway I stopped and looked back. Brian had picked up The Fury from where I’d dropped it and stood holding the sculpture. The light slanting down from the auditorium reflected off the vanes onto his face. It caught his eyes, and as he lifted his head to look back at me, the cinnamon eyes glowed red, like an animal’s by firelight.
On gray days, when the clouds hang in heavy pewter folds and the wind comes down cold and sharp as a blade, I think of Brian Eleazar. We face each other in the sand garden, and between us lies a trail of footprints, scarlet in the fine white sand, as though they were stepped in blood.