The Very Best of Kate Elliott Read online

  At the end of the first week, the diplomat Phalasath Caraglio arrived to give us the official tour of the Squat homeworld. Yes, I know, you’re not supposed to call them Squats, but you can’t really help it. They seem to spend an endless amount of time sitting around, and whether they’re sitting or standing, they only reach hip-high.

  Caraglio gave us the standard Squat lecture as we trundled along in a big sealed barge down a canal filled with gold coins. Or, at least, they looked like gold coins. Since humans couldn’t breathe the atmosphere, none of us had gotten close enough to check for certain.

  “Our hosts are only the second alien group who specifically requested an artistic embassy to their planet, and you will offer them their first glimpse into human art and culture and history. I hope I don’t need to remind you that you were chosen for your professionalism and your skill, and your reputation as a first rank theater company.”

  We all looked at Bax. He sat lounging in the back, listening to whatever Flopsy and Mopsy and Cottontail were whispering in his ears and certainly not listening to M. Caraglio. Bax had short curly black hair and sported the fashionable tricolor face. His lamias matched the colors. Flopsy was pale white and Mopsy was coal black. Cottontail’s skin was a screaming shade of scarlet, which looks okay as a small patch of skin but pretty damned stupid for a whole body. She wore the least clothes—a parti-colored white and black scarf around her hips and a sheer silk blouson—and she must have had enviro work done on her skin implants, too; she never looked cold except, of course, her nipples were always erect. I myself can’t believe that happened simply because she found Bax so staggeringly attractive every second of every day.

  “May I ask a question?” asked the beautiful Peng-Hsin, who oozed Star out of every pore. She plays Lady Macbeth, and her Star-magnitude is every bit as great as Bax’s, with one vital difference: Peng-Hsin Khatun is a professional. M. Caraglio melted in her general direction.

  “Assuredly, M. Peng-Hsin. It is by asking questions that we learn, and we hope, of course, to learn as much about our hosts as they learn about us.”

  “Are we really sailing down a river of gold coins, as it appears?”

  “I’m afraid any answer I give will seem inadequate. Chemically, we don’t know. But as for appearances—certainly they appear as gold coins to us, but we inevitably impress our own biases onto what we see and experience here, and their notion of what these objects are, of what their value is, their notion, even, of how much appearances count at all as opposed to simple reality, we can’t know. Ah.” He broke off and pointed to his left.“There is the building that we believe is their Parliament, or at least, the seat of their governing body.”

  Squat Parliament lay on a flat stretch of ground ringed by three circles of flower beds. A simple, regular octagon, it had neither roof nor walls but a plain white foundation marked out by columns and shaded by a perplexing array of what looked like canvas awnings. It was huge, though; four baseball games could have been played simultaneously on that pale surface. The barge ground to a halt and we crowded over to the left to stare out the view windows.

  “You may have noticed,” added M. Caraglio, pitching his voice higher to carry over our murmuring as we pointed out the clusters of Squats who were, of course, squatting on the green lawns between the flower beds and inside the twin rings of columns that bordered the octagon, “that this, our hosts’ capital city, is not large at all by human standards. There’s some debate within the xenodiplomacy team stationed here whether that is because they simply have a small population or whether their population base is more agrarian and spread out over the land.” He went on, explaining about the relative proportion of land mass to ocean and how that affected their climate and thus their agricultural base and the availability of land for habitation, but something far more interesting was going on outside.

  A Squat came trundling along the river bank, spotted our barge, and waded with its splay feet right out over the gold coins to press its nose— if that little turnip of a bulb could be called a nose—up against the window next to Peng-Hsin. They regarded each other. We all regarded it, and it swiveled its squat little head topped with ivory fern ears and took us all in.

  “It’s curious,” said Peng-Hsin, sounding amused.

  M. Caraglio coughed, sounding uncomfortable.“This has never happened before,” he said.“They’ve always kept their distance. Very careful about that.”

  “Aww,” said Cheri, who combined the oddest mix of sentimentality and hardheadedness,“maybe it’s just a little baby.”

  From the back, Bax burped loudly. “Fuck, it’s ugly,” he said. Mopsy and Flopsy tittered. Cottontail said,“Oh, Bax,” in her breathless knock-me-up voice.

  As if in response to his comment, a whole herd of Squats uprooted themselves from their meditations on the lawn and ambled over toward us. Through the windows, we heard a chorus of hoots rising and falling as the herd of Squats formed a semicircle at the bank of the river. Our Squat pricked up its lacy ears, snuffled one last time toward Peng-Hsin, and then turned and trundled back to the shoreline.

  “Oh, dear,” murmured M. Caraglio. Bax burped again. The diplomat shot him a look so filled with distaste that it was palpable; then, as quickly, he smoothed over his expression into that bland mask that diplomats and out-of-work actors wear. Caraglio went forward to the lock and made some comment through the translation-screen, and the barge scraped sideways over the coins, following our Squat to the bank. As soon as our alien clambered up onto the sward, it was at once swarmed by other Squats rather like the winning runner is in the last game of the Worlds Series.

  “Uh-oh,” said Emmi and Cheri at the same time.

  “Looks like trouble,” Octavian muttered, and we all avoided looking back at Bax. The effect was the same, of course. By not looking at him, we made his presence all the more obvious.

  Three Squats inched forward and climbed up the ramp that led into the forward lock. The smoked glass barrier pretty much cut them off from our sight, but I caught a glimpse of a fanned-out fern ear and the trailing end of a bulb nose brushed across the glass from the other side.

  Then, like the voice of the gods, the translation-screen boomed out words.“One of our young ones has offended one of your people. We beg your pardon.”

  I winced. Octavian covered his ears. On the back bench, Cottontail crossed her arms across her breasts, as if the volume might warp their particularly fine shape. Bax pinched her on the thigh, and she shrieked, giggled, and unwound her arms.

  Caraglio had a sick look on his face, like he’d just eaten something rancid. “Not at all,” he said. “I beg . . . It isn’t . . . Please don’t . . .” He sputtered to a stop, flexed his hands in and out, and began again.“We are sorry that this incident has interrupted your deliberations, and we were not at all disturbed by the interest of your young one.”

  Muted hooting leaked out through the glass barrier as the Squats consulted.

  “What I want to know,” said Kostas in a low voice, “is how from so far away the Squats knew Bax was insulting the poor little thing.”

  The translation-screen crackled to life, but this time, mercifully, the volume had been lowered. “We consider your words,” it squawked in its tinny intonation, not capturing at all the exuberance of Squat hooting, “and will meditate on them. As time continues to flow, you may continue on your journey, but be assured that to our recollection, this incident has not occurred.”

  Caraglio did not even get a chance to reply before they scooted off the barge and we went on our way. I watched Squat Parliament recede and the Squats amble back up the hill to fall into place in scattered groups like flowers being arranged on separate trays.

  “What next?” asked Bax.“They got any dancing girls here?” His lamias shrieked with laughter and he reached over and tweaked Cottontail so hard on her hooters without her even losing a beat in her giggling that I had to wonder if she’d had pain desensitizers built into her skin as well. In her line of work, i
t might not have been a bad idea.

  But Caraglio cut the tour short and we returned to the theater instead. Unsure of what we were supposed to do now, we wandered onto the stage and loitered. Bax and the lamias disappeared into his dressing room. Caraglio headed for El Directore’s office. We heard a knock, a voice, and then the door slammed shut.

  “Who’s going to go eavesdrop?” asked Emmi, and for some damn reason, they all looked at me.

  “Oh, hell,” I said. Ah, well, once a go-between, always a go-between. I exited through one of the doors in the tiring-house wall and snuck down the hallway to stick an ear up against the door. It was a good thing that wood doesn’t transmit emotional heat. I would have been burned.

  “The man is a complete asshole,” shouted Caraglio in a most undiplomatic fashion. “Why is he allowed to run roughshod over the rest of you?”

  “May I be frank with you, M. Caraglio?” said El Directore in a low voice. He sounded tired, and for the first time, I felt some sympathy for him.

  “I wish you would be!”

  “His studio is bankrolling this expedition as a showcase for him and for Peng-Hsin. You can’t have thought that a small theatrical company like ourselves could afford this, even with a government grant?”

  There was silence. Caraglio cleared his throat.“Well, then,” he said, “he must be confined to quarters and to the theater. We cannot have any more such incidents. Surely you understand that.”

  “If he is confined, then so must be everyone else.”

  There was a longer silence.

  “So be it,” said Caraglio in a resigned tone, and he opened the door so quickly that I had to jerk back to maintain my balance.

  “Oh, er, ah,” I said as the diplomat shut the door behind himself.

  He set his hands on his hips and glared at me.“Star quality,” he said, and produced a surprisingly robust raspberry. “Then can you explain to me why M. Baxtrusini acts this way while M. Peng-Hsin, who presumably has the same conditions attaching to her contract and her life, does not?”

  I shrugged.“Why are any of us the way we are? Ask Shakespeare,

  M. Caraglio. He probably had as good an idea of the answer to that question as anyone.” He grunted.“Empathic. Don’t you people know how to read? It says so in the packet of orientation materials.”

  “Empathic?” I echoed weakly. I did not want to admit that the first paragraph of dry prose set beside the first close-grained and utterly confusing diagrammatic map had put me off from the rest. As usual, the government was too cheap to add any decent media values to their official publication.

  Caraglio practically snarled. “The Squats—er, the Squanishta—are considered to be empathic by the xenobiological team that identifies psychological and physiological profiles.”

  “But how can we tell?”

  “I don’t know how they tell! I’m just a goddamned diplomat, and I can tell you, it’s not the aliens I have trouble dealing with! If you’ll excuse me.” He stamped off down the hall, and I can’t say that I blamed him for his bad temper.

  El Directore’s door cracked open slightly. “Is he gone?” our fearless leader asked tremulously. “Say, Ross, could you let the others know about the new restrictions—er, never mind. I’ll ring for Patrick.” Lucky Patrick. As the Stage Manager, he always got the dirty jobs.

  With the restrictions, we ended up spending a hell of a lot of time in the theater, since our hostel was dreary to the point of sublimity. But it was a nice theater. The Squats had evidently spent some time building a tidy little replica of the Globe with real wood, or what passed for real wood. Since the house wasn’t sealed in with the atmospheric shield yet, we could go out and stretch in the yard or sit in the galleries to watch rehearsal or to read or nap or knit, or whatever. It was a good space, as accurate in many ways as the meticulously reconstructed Fourth Globe in London. Certainly the Squats had done their research, and if the theater was any indication, they seemed to care that they gained the fullest appreciation possible of this alien art form.

  So meticulous were they that we had to stop for an entire day when Seton put his foot through the trap in the banqueting scene. We, the lords, were exiting, and Bax had launched into his monologue a bit early, since he liked to rush his big moments, when Sanjar’s foot caught in some loose board and he went through all the way up to his thigh.

  He muttered an oath in a language I didn’t recognize. Octavian and I grabbed him by the arms and heaved him up. He was white around the mouth, and he winced and then tried to put weight on the foot. Meanwhile, Peng-Hsin, downstage, saw us struggling and she broke away from Bax and came up to see if Sanjar was all right.

  Oblivious, Bax continued. “‘For mine own good, all causes shall give way . . .’”

  Sanjar tested the foot. Then he shrugged. Nothing broken, or even sprained. The trap gaped in front of him. El Directore had stood up. He hesitated and then sank down again, and we completed our exit. From off stage I looked back to watch Bax finish his monologue: “‘Strange things I have in head that will to hand, Which must be acted ere they may be scann’d’”

  And Peng-Hsin, amazingly, came in right on cue with her line. Exeunt. Bax had barely gotten off stage before he spun around and tromped back on.

  “What is this?” he demanded, pointing at the trap lying ajar. “How did this happen? I could hurt myself! Tell those damned Squats to fix it!” He marched off, looking deeply offended.

  So we took a day off while the Squats fixed it. We played bridge, hearts, and pinochle in our dreary hostel instead of being able to go out and explore a bit more. Not an edifying way to spend the day. In the morning we returned to the theater to find silver leaves inscribed with odd little squiggles in all the dressing rooms. M. Caraglio informed us that these were evidently some kind of mark of apology for the disruption, proffered by the Squat carpenters. Peng-Hsin promptly made hers into a necklace, thus gracing both the gift and herself. Bax insisted the lamias use theirs as g-strings. And when Emmi imitated Peng-Hsin and strung hers as a necklace, too, he managed to rip it in half in one of their scenes. Cheri caught Emmi’s arm just before Emmi slugged him, and in thanks got groped again.

  “You would think,” said Kostas, “that he gets enough groping in on his entourage that he wouldn’t need to take it out on them.”

  I shrugged. Octavian rolled his eyes. “Kost, I don’t think it’s sex that he’s interested in.”

  “Take a break,” called Patrick, thus saving Cheri from Bax’s hands and Emmi from doing the deed the rest of us would have liked to do ourselves.“Bax and Kostas in fifteen for their final scene.”

  But of course, we all returned in fifteen minutes to watch what was now our favorite scene in the play, the one in which Macduff kills Macbeth on the field of battle. We gathered in the yard, sitting and standing in a casual group so as not to seem too interested.

  “‘Turn, hell-hound, turn!’” Macduff cries when he reenters and sees Macbeth. They fight. Macbeth discovers that Macduff is not “‘of woman born,’” and at that moment realizes that he is doomed. We drank it in.

  “‘Lay on, Macduff, And damn’d be him that first cries,“Hold, enough!”’”

  Now it’s true that in the text Macbeth is killed off stage and Macduff comes back on carrying Macbeth’s head, but it’s rarely played that way. Swordplay is a marvelous thing, and we have plenty of ways these days to make the death look real.

  They fought, and Macduff drove him back and back—

  “Now, wait,” said Bax, lowering his sword. “I’ll drive Macduff back, and when I have him pinned, then I’ll drop my sword and allow him to kill me.”

  “Ah, er,” said El Directore.

  Kostas stared at a point ten feet behind and two feet above Bax’s head, his expression mercifully blank.

  Yu-Sun, who was doubling as the fight choreographer, came downstage.“I beg your pardon, but we need to follow the swordfight as it was rehearsed.”

  They tried it again. Macduff
drives Macbeth back and back, and then suddenly and unexpectedly Bax sidestepped and with main force knocked Kostas flat. It took Kost a second, shaking his head, to get his wind back, but then he climbed back to his feet with sword raised. Bax darted away from him, running downstage, and showily impaled himself on the blade. He fell to his knees, paused, got up again, and sheathed the sword. Then he set his hands on his hips, leaving his sword sticking out at an awkward angle. Yu-Sun, coming back downstage, had to dodge the blade as he swung around; it looked like he was trying to trip her with it.

  “Or if you don’t like that,” said Bax, “then instead I could drive him back, like I suggested the first time. You see, I have him at my mercy, but I realize that death is upon me so I let him kill me.”

  Octavian had his eyes shut, but the rest of us watched in appalled fascination.“Goddess help us,” murmured Cheri,“he’s so damned swellheaded that he can’t let someone else kill him even if it’s in the script. He’s got to control it himself.” She made an obscene little gesture with her left hand.

  “Start again,” said El Directore with a put-upon sigh. “Uh, Macduff with ‘I have no words.’”

  Kostas had that look on his face: doubtless he had no words. Luckily Shakespeare could speak for him. “‘My voice is in my sword, thou bloodier villain Than terms can give thee out!’”

  They fight.

  Kostas restrained himself admirably, even when Bax again deviated from Yu-Sun’s blocking and this time slapped Kostas with the flat of his blade hard on the abdomen. We finally gave up watching, because it was too painful, for Kostas personally and for us as artists. Rehearsal is always tedious when an actor refuses to discover his role and instead attempts to cram it into a pre-formed shape.