The Very Best of Kate Elliott Read online

We had to take off the next day while the Squats put the atmospheric shield in place. At the hostel, Cheri suggested strip poker. We settled on whist.

  The shield rose like a clear glass wall from the yard about one meter in front of the proscenium and bound us all the way back to the back galleries, snaking in to seal off the back rooms and the cellar as well. It felt like performing in a fish bowl. It felt, all at once, restrictive. Octavian and Emmi and I went and sat on the edge of the stage and gazed mournfully at the house, lost to us now. A single Squat walked the galleries, vanished, and then reappeared in the yard, pacing out the area with a stately tread.

  Emmi smiled.“They seem more even-tempered,” she said.“Don’t you think?”

  “How can you tell?” asked Octavian. “It isn’t as if we’ve had any real contact with them.”

  Emmi shrugged.“Oh, I don’t know. Just a feeling I get. They feel more serene.”

  Octavian lifted one eyebrow, looking skeptical.“Emmi, my dear, you’re becoming positively spiritual these days.”

  She laughed, and as if at the sound the Squat lifted its fern ears and wiggled its turnip nose and turned to regard us with the same intent curiosity as we regarded it. Or at least, so we assumed.

  Daringly, Emmi lifted a hand and waved to it.

  And it lifted one of its legs and copied the gesture.

  Emmi broke out into a wide grin. Even Octavian smiled.

  “First contact,” I said.

  “Only for me,” said Emmi.“The first was that little one that came up to Peng-Hsin.”

  The Squat lowered the leg and ambled back into the galleries and disappeared.

  “Maybe they’re not standoffish,” said Octavian in a tone trembling with revelation.“Maybe they’re just polite.”

  “Octavian,” I said, “they did ask us to come here, after all. Why wouldn’t they be polite?”

  “They’re just so—reserved.”

  “Maybe they just don’t want to offend us,” said Emmi.

  “Or us to offend them,” I added, thinking of Bax. And, like the devil, he appeared stage left and shuffled over to us. He looked hungover.

  “Hey you, uh—” He faltered, running a hand through the tangled black frizz of his hair. “—uh, Witch, you. Can you get me something to drink?”

  Emmi got that set look on her face. “Sorry,” she said, hunching a shoulder up against him.“I’m working on my lines.”

  He began to say something more, but then unlucky Patrick came in stage left. “I need something to drink,” said Bax, and burped loudly, and Patrick spun on his heel and went out again. Mercifully, Bax followed him.

  It was a bad day for a run-through. Feeling caged-in got on everybody’s nerves. We either had to stay locked into the warren of rooms behind the stage or else watch the action through the one-way curtain in the musician’s gallery, and tempers ran shorter than usual, which is saying something. Bax couldn’t keep his hands off the witches, and he kept ignoring his blocking and getting in front of the king. The ambient emotional temperature went up about fifty degrees. Except Peng-Hsin, who evidently had huge reserves of calm to draw from. She wore her silver leaf necklace like a badge of courage and grace, and even in her love scenes with Bax managed to steer away from his groping hands without seeming to avoid him.

  Watching them act together was a study in contrasts. The true test, we had long since decided, of Peng-Hsin’s professionalism was the way she could play a loving Lady Macbeth to Bax’s Macbeth. “‘And I feel now the future in the instant,’” she says in Act I Scene V.

  “‘My dearest love,’” he said—and bit her.

  And I mean really bit her.

  Peng-Hsin let out a startled and most unprofessional shriek. She jerked away from him, slapping a hand up over her cheek. A drop of blood leaked out from between her fingers, then another, then a third. She lowered her hand to reveal her cheek; his teeth marks showed clearly, as well as the blood welling up in a rough semicircle, where his bite had broken her skin.

  All hell broke loose. Cheri gasped so loudly she might as well have shouted, and we all began talking and shouting at once. Peng-Hsin spun and ran off the stage. Patrick hurriedly called for a break, and Cheri and Emmi ran downstairs to minister to Peng-Hsin. El Directore laid his head down on the edge of the stage. For an instant, I thought he was hiding tears of sheer frustration.

  Bax licked his lips. “Hey, what about the rest of my scene?” he demanded.

  El Directore lifted his face—dry-eyed, I noted—and lifted a hand to signal to Patrick, sealed into the control booth in the back of the house. “Cast meeting on stage in thirty minutes,” he said. He circled the stage and vanished into his office. Bax left for his dressing room.

  In thirty minutes, we gathered like vultures, all of us. Peng-Hsin, flanked by Emmi and a militant looking Cheri, had a patch of skin-meld covering the wound on her cheek. Patrick and El Directore arrived. Then we waited for another five minutes. Bax ambled out finally, looking bored.

  “I think,” said El Directore in a low, irresolute voice, “that you owe an apology.”

  Bax sighed, looking put-upon. “All right, all right,” he said briskly. “I’m sorry I brought the girls with me. It was a little tasteless, I know, since we’re stuck here and you guys and gals can’t possibly be getting the same quality of sex as I am, but hey, we’re all professionals here, and this is one of the things you have to go through to do this kind

  of work.”

  Struck dumb, we merely stared at him.

  El Directore, surprisingly enough, spoke first. “Er, ah,” he said forcefully.“Well, then, I’ll make this short.We have our premiere performance in seven days. Tomorrow we do a full tech run-through and the day after we go to dress.”

  And so we did. Bax restrained himself to minor and individual acts of cruelty, like twisting arms and hitting people with his sword and the usual groping. And of course we couldn’t say anything. He had apologized, after all, or so El Directore reminded us. And he was a Star.

  Bruised and battered we got ready for the premiere.

  Still, it was hard not to get excited, especially as the galleries and the yard filled up with hooting Squats. Against all rules, I snuck up to the musician’s gallery to catch a glimpse, and found Emmi and—mark my soul!—Peng-Hsin there, gazing wide-eyed out at our audience.

  “Gee,” said Emmi on an exhalation.“Wow.”

  The shield was marvelously transparent and gave us a clear view of the house and the two thousand aliens. Ivory fern ears furled and unfurled to some unknown rhythm and the Squats almost seemed to be bobbing, like a swelling sea, as they waited. For an instant, I felt their excitement as much as my own.

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Peng-Hsin said, and then covered her mouth with a hand and laughed the kind of laugh a child gives on Christmas Eve when she sees the lit tree and all the presents for the first time.

  “Places,” said Patrick through the inner-mike system. As we went down the stairs, we met M. Caraglio coming up, to watch from this hidden vantage point.

  “Good luck,” he said, and we all winced in horror, and like a good diplomat he caught our reaction and added, stumbling,“Oh, ah, break a leg.” We retreated in some disorder back to our rightful places.

  House lights down. Stage lights up. A desert Heath. Thunder and lightning. Enter three Witches.

  It went well. Our audience was attentive; even through the shield we heard their taut silence. And we had come together as a cast over the last five weeks, especially since we all felt the same way about one person in particular. There is nothing like shared disgust to bring focus to a play, especially the Scottish play with its bloody villain.

  He was the villain, and we made him so.

  Birnam Wood did come toward Dunsinane, and Macbeth met, at long last, the man who was of no woman born. They fight.

  We watched through the door plackets set up, like the gallery curtain, to be a one-way view port. Was it possible that we woul
d finish as we were meant to, that we wouldn’t be embarrassed in front of these intent aliens, that we, the first human artists they had encountered, could give a command performance and prove ourselves worthy of the title of artists?

  Octavian gave a little groan. Of course not. Even here, in the actual performance, Bax had to ruin it. The two men lock swords corps-acorps; it was supposed to come to naught—they break away from each other and the fight continues to its inevitable end. But Bax, damn him, had to throw it. With Kostas unsuspecting, it was possible for Bax to throw and twist and wrench Macduff ’s sword out of his grip. The sword clattered to the stage with awful finality.

  There was a terrible pause. Macbeth holds Macduff at his mercy.

  Like an animal cornered by a cobra, we were too paralyzed with fear and—yes, with sheer hatred—to close our eyes.

  And Bax stepped back, allowing Kostas to pick up his lost sword. Bax opened his arms to receive the death blow. And then he added the crowning insult of adding a line to Shakespeare.

  “Oh, my God,” he said. His eyes widened. Kostas, no fool, ran him through between the body and the arm.

  Bax fell and lay as still as death. It was the best acting he’d done the whole time. Entering with the other lords, I was impressed despite myself.

  Meanwhile, Macduff had, as we staged it, staggered off and collapsed where we could conveniently overlook him until Siward sees him.

  The final lines passed smoothly. They had never run quite so strongly before. “‘Hail, King of Scotland!’” we cry, and Malcolm makes his final speech. Curtain.

  The shield dimmed until it was opaque. Through it, we heard the muted hooting of the Squats. We panted, waiting for the rest of the cast to come out for the curtain call. Bax didn’t move.

  “Sulking,” muttered Octavian.

  Jon-Jon, who’d been too long in the business to let a grudge mar the professionalism of the moment, hurried over to help him up. He bent. He shook Bax. He shook him again. He gave a little cry and straightened up.

  “I think he’s dead.”

  He was dead.

  M. Caraglio burst onto the stage, took one look at the situation, and barked,“No curtain call! Where’s—”

  El Directore stumbled out from the back as well. He wrung his hands together.“What will we do? What will we do? What if the studio withdraws their funding? This is terrible. How did this happen? He had no heart condition listed on his health records.”

  “We must go apologize at once to the Squanishta,” said Caraglio. “Can you imagine the kind of misunderstandings this could foster?”

  All at once I recalled that if the Squats really were empathic, then our audience was absorbing an entire second performance here and now, despite the curtain being nominally closed.

  Finally, thank goodness, Patrick appeared and took everything in hand. “Yu-Sun, you and Octavian carry off—ah—” Even his aplomb was shaken by the sight of Bax lying there dead.“Move him back to his dressing room. And for the Goddess’ sake, get the three good-time girls out of there.”

  “If you’ll come with me,” said Caraglio to El Directore.“And perhaps a representative from the actors as well.”

  They all looked at me. Ah well, once a go-between, always a go-between. I walked in a daze with the other two around front to the communications lock. I was not surprised to find that three Squanishtas had arrived before us, fern ears unfurled, their bodies otherwise motionless as they hunkered down on the other side of the lock wall.

  Both sides spoke at the same time.“We beg your pardon—”

  Both sides stopped.

  After a moment of polite silence, Caraglio began again.“Please, your excellencies, be assured that the tragedy that has happened here today is a complete mystery to us. I must beg your pardon for this terrible disruption. We hope you will forgive us and allow us a suitable time to—ah—recover and explain.”

  They hooted. The translation crackled through the screen. “It was a wise and well-thought play. Please do not think we did not appreciate it, or think that it failed in any way although there was this slight mishap. One has only to hear the words to understand their meaning.”

  The middle one shifted forward—somewhat rashly, I thought, given what I’d seen of them—and pressed its turnip nose up against the cloudy lock wall as if to make sure we understood how important the next remark was. As if to make sure that we understood that it understood.“My voice is in my sword.”

  There was a pause while the three jockeyed for position, and the rash one was shouldered to the back as if the other two were aghast at its rudeness.

  “We hope,” continued one of the other two—I couldn’t be sure which—“that in this small way we have spared you the distress of failing to complete your work of art.”

  “Oh, my God,” said Caraglio, an eerie echo of Bax’s last words. “I’ve got to get back to the office.”

  “I don’t understand,” said El Directore. But I did.

  Caraglio made polite farewells, and we exited the lock. We wound our way back through the protected corridor. Caraglio left at once. I went back to the stage.

  Bax was still lying there, dead. Through the tiring house doors, thrown open, I could hear shrieking and wailing from the back: the lamias were objecting to being thrown out of the dressing room—I couldn’t tell if they were also mourning for their lost patron, or only their privileges—and Yu-Sun and Octavian didn’t want to touch the body until they had somewhere to take it.

  “But what happened?” demanded Cheri. Emmi wiped tears—not, I think, for Bax personally, but for the shock of it all—from her cheeks. Peng-Hsin stood with regal dignity. The others crowded together for comfort.

  “The Squats did it,” I said. “I’d guess that they sort of used their empathic powers to make his heart seize up, or something.”

  “But why?” asked Peng-Hsin quietly.

  “Isn’t it obvious what the outcome of the play is? Isn’t it almost a ritualistic act, the entire thing? And they wouldn’t have built this—” I waved at the theater, “—if they didn’t care about us doing well. If they didn’t want us to succeed. And they read, from us, the object of the play was for Macbeth to die. How embarrassing for us if we failed to accomplish that act, in our first performance for them.”

  Mercenary Cheri suddenly stifled a giggle behind a hand.

  I shrugged. What else was there to say? The real cleanup would be left for the diplomats. And it was funny, in a black kind of way.

  I looked over at Bax. The rest of them did, too. It’s hard not to look at a corpse, especially when he’s the one person in the room that everyone was wishing dead just half an hour before.

  “They were just trying to be helpful.”

  SUNSEEKER

  A JARAN STORY

  THEY GAVE HER A berth on the Ra because her father was famous, not because he was rich. Wealth was no guarantor of admittance to the ranks of the fabled Sunseekers; their sponsors didn’t need the money. But there was always a price to be paid, due at unforeseen intervals decided upon by the caprice of the self-appointed leaders of their intrepid little band of a dozen or so sunseeking souls.

  Right now, they had started in on Eleanor, an elegant girl of Bantu ancestry whose great-grands had made their fortune gunrunning along the Horn of Africa (so it was rumored) and parlayed that wealth into a multisystem import/export business.

  “Sweetkins, I’m not sure I can stand to look at much more of that vegetable fiber. Cotton!” “Algodón!” Akvir mimicked Zenobia’s horrified tone. “I thought we’d agreed to wear only animal products.” “If we don’t hold to standards,” continued Zenobia, “it’ll be soybric next. Or, Goddess forbid, nylon.”

  Eleanor met this sally with her usual dignified silence. She did not even smooth a hand over her gold and brown robe and trousers, as any of the others would have, self-conscious under scrutiny. Rose suspected her of having designs both on Akvir—self-styled priest of the Sunseekers—and on the coveted posit
ion of priestess. Of course it went without saying that the priestess and the priest had their own intimate rites, so after all, if one was priestess, one got Akvir—at least for as long as his sway over the group held.

  “That a tattoo?” Eun-soo plopped down beside Rose. The seat cushion exhaled sharply under the pressure of his rump. He was new on board, and already bored.

  “What?” Self-consciously, remembering—how could she ever, ever forget?—she touched the blemish on her cheek.

  “Brillianté, mon,” he said, although the slang sounded forced. He was too clean-cut to look comfortable in the leather trousers and vest he sported. He looked made up, a rich-kid doll sold in the marketplace for poor kids to play pretend with. “Makes a nice statement, cutting up the facial lines with a big blotch like that. It’s not even an image tattoo, like a tigre or something, just a—” He paused, searching for words.

  She already knew the words.

  Blot. Eyesore. Flaw. Birth defect.

  She was irrevocably marred. Disfigured. Stained.

  These words proclaimed by that famous voice which most every soul on this planet and in most of the other human systems would recognize. Golden-tongued and golden-haired. Chrysostom. Sun-struck. El Sol. There were many epithets for him, almost all of them flattering.

  “Ya se ve!” Eun-soo clapped himself on the head with an open hand, a theatrical display of sudden insight. “You’re the actor’s kid, no? You look like him—”

  “If never so handsome,” said Akvir, who had bored of his pursuit of Eleanor.

  “No one is as handsome as my father,” snapped Rose, for that was both her pride and her shame.

  “I thought there were operations, lasers, that kind of thing.” Eun-soo stared at her with intense curiosity.

  To see a blemished person was rare. To see one anywhere outside the ranks of the great lost, the poor who are always with us in their shacks and hovels and rags even in this day of medical clinics in every piss-poor village and education for every forlorn or unwanted child, was unheard of.

  “Yeah, there are,” she said, standing to walk over to Eleanor’s seat. She stared out the tinted window of the ship. The Surbrent-Xia solar array that powered the engines made the stubby wings shimmer as light played across them. Here, above the cloud cover that shrouded the western Caribbean, the sun blazed in all its glory. Ever bright. Up here, following the sunside of the Earth, it was always day.