Too, Too Solid Flesh Read online

  Hamlet nodded and said absently, “Computer models of long-dead actors. Osric adores them.” He was staring far away.

  “He’s not alone. Simulas killed live acting the way talking film killed silent film, the way color almost killed black and white, the way synth killed live music.” He added bitterly, “Nobody will pay new actors now.” Horatio looked back at Hamlet. “I thought you knew.”

  “But our audience.” Hamlet gestured to the seats. “The people who come night after night to see us. Surely there’s still a demand—”

  Horatio shook his head. “There’s an old line from a simula—I think it used to be a movie: ‘Not even Shakespeare could watch Hamlet three nights in a row.’ Some people watch you because they’re LabTeks. The rest probably came because androids are a novelty, or because they want sex. They can’t care about live theater any more.” He added, gently, “I’m sorry, my lord.”

  Hamlet dropped his eyes. “I wondered why they hardly ever clapped. I kept thinking: perhaps modern performance standards are incredibly high.”

  Horatio bit his lip. “Some clap.”

  Hamlet looked up. “Thanks for that, at least.” He stared at the empty seats, then turned back to Horatio. “If you’re not an actor, what are you?”

  “What am I?” Horatio made a mock bow. “Your friend and servant, my lord.”

  “I hope so—my friend. What else are you?”

  Horatio looked from side to side—a useless holdover from the days when walls couldn’t have ears unless the ears were on spies. “Where can we talk?”

  Hamlet said puzzledly, “Anywhere.”

  “I mean unscanned.” Horatio leaped off the stage and walked quickly down the aisle. He hesitated and was nearly knocked over as Hamlet, cape streaming, swept by.

  Hamlet turned, smiling, at the lobby door, Horatio said quickly, “I know, I know: ‘the Curse of Consciousness.’” He opened the door; Hamlet, with a princely nod, walked through first.

  Horatio had seen the lobby often in the past three days, but never at night. The fireflies and cave glowworms (free light for low-light places) shone brightly.

  Bromeliads grew between clumps of Spanish moss on liveoak. Huge, pale-green luna moths fluttered restlessly in the vegetation. More than these things he noticed, and was comforted by, the peeping of tree frogs and chirp of crickets and katydids.

  Ambient noise could be filtered from scans, but who would bother in a theater lobby?

  Hamlet was standing eagerly at the lobby doors. “Are we going to talk outside?”

  Horatio gaped. “Where Access can hear us?”

  “What’s Access?”

  “I’ll show you.” He said loudly, “Access?” Nothing happened. He relaxed. “I can’t show you here. It lets people talk to one another and to thinkware and to simulas—some rich people have even made simulas of themselves, so you can’t tell whether you’re talking to the original or the copy. It’s everywhere.”

  Hamlet looked thoughtful. “My Denmark had spies and listeners. Instead, you inform on yourselves.”

  Horatio said, “Do many people win arguments with you?”

  Hamlet’s smile faded. “I see so few people, and the androids…” He said abruptly, “Why haven’t you asked if the other players know that you’re Human?”

  Horatio was thrown by the change of subject. “Most of them don’t seem to think of me at all.”

  “Most of them don’t think at all.” Hamlet went on reluctantly, “They are my family, my—friends, and I won’t have them spoken ill of.” He smiled briefly. “Even after I speak ill of them. But,” and he began pacing, “they don’t think. They can’t remember. They’re like me, only less.”

  He turned to Horatio, looking hurt. “Claudius is quite good. And I love my mother and Ophelia.” He shook his head quickly. “Who helped you come here?”

  “Would I need help?”

  “Oh, come.” Hamlet waved a hand, startling a tree frog from its perch. “Even the Teks told us you were an android. Do they know you’re human?”

  “No.”

  “Then who helped you?”

  Horatio stalled. “No one was supposed to know.”

  “Someone knew.” Hamlet’s edge reminded Horatio that android princes didn’t even treat humans as equals.

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “Doctor Peter Capek.”

  Hamlet looked away quickly. Horatio said, “I’m sorry.”

  Hamlet said huskily, “God did less for you than he for me. He touched me, and I breathed.” He waved his arms. “In a world where we are seduced by the selfish, hurt by the cruel, and monitored by the indifferent, he was kind to me.

  “I can remember,” and there were tears in Hamlet’s eyes, “walking the lab halls and finding that I had my hand in his, and he said nothing till I noticed. And when I saw—” His voice broke. “He laughed and called me ‘son.’”

  Horatio stood awkwardly. “I only saw him by Access. He seemed a good man.”

  Hamlet looked back. “If you never met him, how did you manage to join the company?”

  “He said he’d make all the arrangements I needed. Most of them were probably data entry; all I had to do was be me and match the data on the Globe scanner. I’ll bet he pulled a one-shot.”

  “A what?”

  “A one-time entry code. Thinkware vendors use them all the time so that users can only make one copy of a product. Only this time, my theater ID was the one-shot, and everyone thought afterward that Capek created me with the theater system—”

  “Is it like the system outside?” Hamlet interrupted.

  “Separate, I think.” It hadn’t let Horatio on it.

  Hamlet smiled—a sharp lip twitch—as he thought aloud. “Access is no place for secrets; perhaps the theater has one.” His eyes shone. “The most magic words in the world: ‘I know a secret.’ That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

  Horatio finally nodded. “A few days ago, Doctor Capek Accessed—someone—saying that Capek had misgivings about something in the Globe Hamlet Troupe. That person Accessed me, showing me Capek. I was arranged to come into the Globe secretly, as an android.”

  Hamlet said quietly, “And after you spoke, Capek died, but you came anyway. Are you here for revenge?”

  “Who the hell takes revenge any more?”

  Hamlet merely looked at him.

  Horatio, unsettled, said, “Right. I’ m a kind of cop. The regular police were told to stay out, that company police and the company lab would perform the autopsy on Capek—”

  “Is that common?”

  “If you have money.”

  Hamlet raised an eyebrow. “Bitterness?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. The company that owns the Globe Hamlet Troupe said it was protecting chem patents that might come out in the autopsy. They paid a security licensing bond and submitted their own scan report. They left a lot out, like why, in a building with its own Access, Capek couldn’t get quick medical help, and why the scanback release was delayed until the report was assembled.”

  “And you think it was murder.” Hamlet was half on tiptoe, suddenly excited.

  “Maybe.” Horatio was reminded again how like a small boy Hamlet could be, for all his quick thinking.

  “And you came in secret to check on it. Now I know a secret,” Hamlet breathed. “Why tell me?”

  Horatio scuffed at the roots of the liveoak. “You’d already guessed. Besides, I may need your help.”

  “Am I the only one who knows that you are human?”

  “Yes. I think… Claudius looked at me strangely today. I was rehearsing my lines.”

  Hamlet looked shocked. “Good God, you might’s well rehearse your pulse. Our lines are built in, laid in our neuroputty. Listen—”

  He put an arm on Horatio’s shoulders, the first time he had done so. “If you must practice lines, do them with an odd gesture.” He swept his free arm around. “Or a stray delivery.” He cleared his throat excessively and i
ntoned, “O that this too too solid flesh—”

  “That’s ‘sallied’”

  “Use a fruity tone and it’s both. Stop thinking of plays as printed text.”

  “Thanks for the advice, m’lord.” They walked back toward the stage together.

  A corpse in a crown, crawling with pill bugs and millipedes and glowing in radium blue-green, rose before them. A bracket fungus covered his mottled crown.

  Horatio leaped back. “Jesus!”

  “Sorry.” The ghost’s jaw, hanging freely in its undone shroud, flipped up when he talked and dropped when he quit, as though his puppeteer had it backward. “I’m trying a new look. Like it?”

  Horatio said indifferently, “It works.” Hamlet regarded him solemnly until he added, “Maybe it’s a bit much.”

  Hamlet said, “You must be the something rotten in the state of Denmark; I can almost smell you—can I smell you?”

  “Putrezene,” the ghost said proudly. “Like it?”

  “If we say yes, will you shut it off?” Hamlet added firmly, “You know the rule: no smells. The mix of odors gets hideous. Your looks carry you, anyway.” He patted the ghost’s shoulder. The shadow of his arm suddenly cast upward in the glowing green when he nearly touched the apparition.

  “Thanks, m’lord. Do you like the light? A SecondTek suggested it, to look like radiation poisoning.”

  He looked nervously at Horatio, who nodded encouragement. “It’s terrific. How do you change that? Do you have a body?”

  He looked around. “Not here. Most of me is a simula, printed on neuroputty like yours.”

  Horatio gaped. “Just like our neuro—right, sure.”

  The ghost, clearly insecure, said, “Don’t feel superior; I can do things you can’t.” Tiny grids flickered over and through the image: patterns of other kings, ghosts of ghosts. “I can be old or I can look like young Hamlet. I can be a freshly dead king with blood in one ear, or a skeleton, or—”

  Hamlet held up a hand. “The world is so full of a number of kings, I’m sure we should all be as happy as things. Were you looking for me when you showed up?”

  “Oh. Right.” The ghost drew himself up, dislodged a few scarab beetles, and chanted, “I came to tell you of a murder. Murder most foul, as in the best it is—”

  Hamlet frowned. “I know; you’re my father’s ghost—”

  “Yes—no. Don’t confuse me; I mean a real murder.”

  Horatio froze. Hamlet said, “Of one of the company?”

  “Of Capek.”

  3

  Eventually, the ghost said hopefully, “Is this a dramatic pause?”

  Hamlet wheeled on the ghost and suddenly, shockingly, drew his sword.

  The ghost fell back automatically. Hamlet said, “He died from a biochem spill.”

  “Or by poisoning.”

  “Accidents happen.” Hamlet left the lobby and entered the theater.

  “Then how come there’s never been another?”

  “He died alone.” The lobby door swung shut behind Hamlet. Horatio edged into the seats to watch. The main light where he sat, under the balcony, was from the ghost. It turned Hamlet into a green parody of death.

  “He didn’t die alone,” the ghost said unhappily, and with great effort the ghost held still before Hamlet and his sword. “Please don’t come at me like that—”

  “The scanner records show that no one was with him.”

  “They were faked.”

  “How do you know?” Hamlet pointed the sword at the ghost’s throat.

  “I saw the murderer.”

  “Who was it?” he shouted. His sword touched the rotted throat and a thin moist cut appeared in response. “Was it Goode? Was it that damned, wretched usurper, Alan Goode?”

  The ghost said desperately, “I didn’t know the guy.” Then he said, “Why did you think it was Alan Goode?”

  Hamlet said tonelessly, “What did you see?”

  “Lemme think.” He screwed up his decaying face, concentrating. The reassigned memory caused his image to waver. He was an early model, not even as good as a commercial simula of years before.

  “Okay. It was two in the morning, so nobody was around. The halls were dim, saving power, and I was using the empty hall to practice walking up and down, you know?”

  “Walking up and down in the earth,” Hamlet said.

  Horatio looked as blank as the ghost. “What’s that?”

  “It’s from the ‘Book of Job.’ The Bible.” Hamlet was far more acid and far less pleasant than he had been a few moments before. “Go on. Make me hear the rest of this.”

  “Sure. Anyway, I was practicing. See, it’s hard to do it right when your feet don’t make any noise—”

  “Alas, poor ghost,” Hamlet said through clenched teeth.

  The ghost said hastily, “Anyway, the hall lights went up, so I knew someone human was around. They’re tuned to real brains—”

  Hamlet and Horatio looked at each other briefly. Hamlet had known about the omnilights, but hadn’t considered their consequences for Horatio. Horatio hadn’t known, but had been very lucky so far.

  “So I quit walking and watched—”

  “How?” Horatio asked.

  Hamlet glared, but the ghost, glad of the mood lightener, said, “It’s kind of neat, really. I watch by—” He stumbled on the words. “Reflexive projection. The light around me disturbs the light in me.”

  Hamlet nodded. “Just as I’m reflective, and the dark outside disturbs the dark in me. Now, will you for God’s sake say something material, spirit?”

  Horatio said, “You’re talking strangely, my lord.” He watched the sword in Hamlet’s hand whip back and forth.

  The ghost said hastily, “I saw this pudgy guy, wearing some kind of headband. He didn’t look real aware to start with, but about a second after I saw him his face went glassy and the lights went back out. He kept walking straight but all stiff, and then he walked out of the hall.”

  Hamlet sheathed his sword. The ghost and Horatio both relaxed.

  Horatio asked, “Did you tell the police or the Teks?”

  The ghost looked startled and pointed a decayed finger at Hamlet. “He’s the one I’m supposed to tell about dead bodies. It says so, right in Act One.”

  Hamlet said, “You spoke of his walk. Do it for me.”

  “What?”

  “You were practicing walking; you would have noticed. Show it to me.”

  The ghost dimmed, thinking, then trod forward in a motion at once fluid and mechanical. Hamlet watched. “Try again.” Almost immediately he said, “Stop.”

  The ghost stopped. “My lord?”

  “Do you hear?” Hamlet said to Horatio. “No ‘doctor’ for Goode, but he says ‘my lord’ to me. Kings and princes don’t call doctors ‘doctor.’ Dead kings don’t call doctors at all.” To the ghost he said, “Thank you. Now go. And thank you. Tell no one. Thank you, thank you. Go.”

  The ghost, taking the hint, vanished. Hamlet straightened and looked darkly at Horatio. “You heard?”

  “Every word,” Horatio quoted from the play, but added, “Including yours, which aren’t real sane.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “Not much. I know what I feel.”

  “Be careful. Comedy is for the man who thinks, tragedy for the man who feels. What do you feel?”

  Horatio grabbed Hamlet’s cloak. “For Christ’s sake, talk like someone real.”

  Hamlet put his hand to his sword, dropped it, and smiled weakly. “It’s the stress. I drop into character.”

  Horatio said, “Do you think the ghost told the truth?”

  Hamlet shook his head. “He thinks so. Tell me a lie.”

  Horatio shrugged. “Okay. Two and two is five.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Hey, would I lie?”

  “Good. Now ask me what two and two is.”

  Horatio said nothing. Hamlet went on, “If you lie inside me, to my thinkware, I’ll be as cer
tain that two and two is five as the ghost is that he saw a man in the dark.”

  “Maybe he did see a man.”

  “Certainly.” Hamlet smiled crookedly. “And you just saw a ghost. Was he here?”

  “Of course… Oh. ‘The body is not with the King.’

  Hamlet smiled tiredly. “The ghost’s body is as large as two bunched fists, and is in a jar in the labs… he visited himself once, to pay his respects, and brought panic and religion to two Teks who should have known better.” He spread his hands. “Or should they? They saw a dead man.”

  “So maybe the ghost met nobody in that hall?”

  Hamlet raised a warning finger. “This is an ‘I think,’ not an ‘I know.’ But you’ve seen the projected images—the castle walls, the graveyard, and so forth, on stage. I imagine you’ve seen smaller projections—possibly rich people projecting elegant jewelry or clothes.”

  “Good guess. The middle rich do. Really rich people own the real thing,” Horatio said bitterly.

  “Then what’s to prevent a rich murderer from pretending to have a fat body and a strange walk?”

  Horatio opened his mouth and shut it. What was? “If you’re right, I may not know enough about Tekmat to find anything out about the death of Doctor Capek.”

  Hamlet put his hand on his chin, a common soliloquy pose.

  “You may not,” he said frankly. “I don’t see why they sent you, when someone who knew more about androids, or about Simula, or about labs—most of the space behind the theater is taken up with labs—would be more useful. Why did anyone send you?”

  “Because I could go on stage” Horatio said flatly. “No one else could do as good a job at that.”

  “And was it so very important to send you in disguise?”

  Horatio said quickly, “It’s crucial. No one must know I’m here and investigating.”

  “How can you even pretend that, in a place where there are scanners everywhere?”

  Horatio grinned. “Did you ever lose a prop onstage?”

  “My book for the ‘To Be Or Not To Be’ speech, under one of Osric’s damned hats.”

  “Now lose it in a library of two million volumes.” Hamlet looked blankly at him, and he went on, “Generally, the more you scan, the worse your security gets even with thinkware—you run out of time to check everything.”