Too, Too Solid Flesh Read online

  Beneath the gloss were craters of gray, necrotic flesh. The craters on his forehead, pulled wider by taut planes of healthy flesh—also frozen—exposed bare, dead bone.

  He looked like a badly mended china doll. His eyes, ringed with small corroded pits, were mobile and bitter.

  He sat, staring at Horatio, his strong arms resting lightly on his knees. This man would never ask Horatio who he was; it was many years since he had been polite to anyone.

  Horatio said, “Mr. Thibodeaux?”

  Thibodeaux’s voice sounded startlingly angry, coming from his immobile, ruined face. “Like my looks, son? I’ll bet I’m the only one like me you’ve ever seen. Know what causes it?”

  Horatio said haltingly, “Pamphigia?”

  “Pamphigia Nova—the worst. The twenties epidemic.”

  “That’s right.” It was a rare genetic disorder; some people thought that it was a man-caused mutation. “It’s an autoimmune disease.”

  Thibodeaux coughed. “Damn right it is. My body’s killing itself, from the face on in.” He reached up, tapping his face. It made a sound like struck glass. “They froze me—polymers, organic cements, you name it. But they were sloppy back then. They froze some of my spine, too.”

  The chair shifted impatiently. Thibodeaux snarled at it, “Stay.” It stopped. “I hate this thing.”

  He showed his teeth—the only way he could smile. “There’s a solvent they can spray on, some day when I feel like dying. Unless by then there’s a cure, and since hardly anybody was born with PN, I’m the only one looking for it” He leaned forward.

  “What have you found out?”

  “Nothing so far, sir. The Globe has a separate Access—we knew that—and Capek ran groundware on the system so that I’ll be accepted as an android. The Teks haven’t asked where I came from. I’d love to know what the system tells them about me.”

  “But what have you found out?”

  “Like I said, nothing.” Horatio hesitated. “I got one nice break. I couldn’t take any thinkware in with me—too much chance of it getting caught or scanned by their system—but I will be able to use some of theirs.”

  “And not get caught?” Thibodeaux’s voice showed the disbelief his face couldn’t. “Do you know how I found someone like you? Simula National made the thinkware to figure out what kind of person I needed, then it searched until it found you, then I destroyed it. All that didj for a dream. Are you gonna get caught, boy?”

  “Probably not.” He paused. “It’s one of the androids, sir. He’s already guessed that the theater has a secret.”

  Thibodeaux actually shifted in his chair, like an excited person moving under water. “Did he say what kind?”

  “He doesn’t know.”

  Horatio went on, telling everything about the ghost’s testimony, about Hamlet’s desire to find the murderer and the secret behind the Globe, about Hamlet’s abilities.

  At the end, Thibodeaux leaned forward until Horatio felt he was falling into one of the holes on the old man’s face. He demanded, “Does he know what you are?”

  Horatio said, “No, sir. I let him think I was a policeman.”

  4

  Horatio paused at the Globe entrance. The lobby door said nothing. He crossed the lobby, and the theater door said immediately, “Enter.” He wondered if the lobby were really dead space, or if the scanner there was not acknowledging its presence.

  If lobby security were covert, and if thinkware sorted conversations, then his and Hamlet’s secrets were known already. Horatio shrugged and entered the theater.

  He looked in the dim light at the empty seats, at the fly-lights, and at the side and top screenjets that generated the scenery. The front curtain was real; the dead brocade hung limply, bunched at stage right and left. Horatio touched one of the curtains. Dust and the musty odor of old, damp cloth drifted from it. It was probably taken from one of the abandoned theaters on Broadway—the Schubert or the Winter Garden.

  When he was very young, on a rare visit to New York, his mother took him to the Martin Beck Theater off Broadway, By then, its ceiling pictures were faded and the plaster cracked. He had asked his mother why the carpet hadn’t grown back where it was worn.

  She bought him an egg cream and herself a beer. They sat in the battered, creaking balcony seats. A pretty red-haired girl in an overcoat (the theater was unheated) handed them a program for Meronick’s The War Prayer.

  His mother complained for the fiftieth time that it was a Leftie play but that it was cheap and there weren’t many shows to pick from. Horatio gaped at the high ceilings and the people (some of them strangely dressed) boxed in with them, facing a wall made of curtain. The curtain opened—

  And a figure stood in front of them, saying he was an angel of the Lord. Horatio never forgot the chill that went over him when he knew he wasn’t seeing a screen or a projection, but a real, live angel.

  Then he realized that the angel was a person playing pretend better than anyone he had ever known, and Horatio wanted, with his whole heart and soul, to stand before groups of people and convince them that he was an angel, or Lincoln, or Luthor Tandia, the Pan-American War hero.

  He never wanted anything else again. He grew up in Illinois, practicing impatiently as one by one the theaters went simula or bankrupt or simply closed.

  By the time he was ten, “live” theaters only showed simulas of old performances. By the time he was eighteen, Simula National had quit scanning people for simulas and simply recycled old simulas or created new ones out of scanned sounds and photographs.

  He gave up on acting and drifted from odd job to odd job, mostly security work that left him time to read plays or listen to Newzak obituaries of actors. He drank a bit. Thibodeaux’s thinkware had Accessed him at a liveguard job in an abandoned shopping mall in Indianapolis.

  But now—

  Horatio clutched the decaying curtains and faced the seats, remembering how terrified he had been performing. On the rare occasions he had Accessed, he had spoken easily before thousands of strangers. But facing them, while they sat physically in front of him, not projections, and watched him! It was indescribable, like having a live thing clutching at his stomach and leaping in his chest.

  For all his reading of theater materials, he was too young to have heard of “stage fright.” All he knew was that he had ignored the feeling and had convinced an audience that he was Shakespeare’s Horatio.

  “I’m an actor,” he said, listening to the echo in the empty theater. “I’m the last actor in the whole world.”

  In his mind he heard Thibodeaux’s thinkware agent ask why he was willing to take the job, and heard himself casually answer, “It might be fun.” He smiled to himself.

  Faint light flickered at the lobby doors. Maybe he’d been scanned after all and hadn’t passed security. He clucked behind the stage curtain, holding his breath.

  He had known that he could never smuggle a weapon into the theater. He peered at the far side of the stage, where the rapiers had already obediently flown to their places in the prop-rack, next to the daggers. He could never get there if someone with a personal scanner were looking for him. All he could do was run to his right and hope he could exit through the lab door or the lobby. He braced to run—

  A woman’s voice called, “You. Horatio-robot.”

  He peered around the curtain. She was in her twenties: short, dark-haired, and muscular. She wore a gray sheath skirt that was probably livecotton. How had she gotten past the security system? Did she work here?

  She said again, “Horatio-robot. Come out, damn it!” She folded her arms and tapped her foot impatiently, clearly for effect; on the livewool aisle it made little noise.

  He could exit, going back to the androids’ quarters. Unless she were staff, she’d never be able to follow him.

  He started to leave, then froze. “Stupid,” he whispered to himself. By now the halls were free of human staff; if he entered them, the lights would go on and the scanners would rec
ord that he was human—unless Capek had arranged a bypass of that system for him.

  “Horatio god-damned robot!”

  He stepped onstage. “The preferred term is android.”

  “Whatever.” He heard the tinkle of music. Probably she wore singing jewelry. She hoisted herself onstage, ignoring the steps on the aisles.

  Once there, she looked happily over the empty seats. “I knew it would look like this.” She put her hands on her hips and struck a pose, nobly and unnaturally.

  He said, “How did you get in?”

  “The door, darling, the door. Nobody stopped me.” She stuck her chin out, trying to sound ruthless and looking childish. “That’s how it is when I want something.”

  “Do you want something?” Horatio asked. He was annoyed by her full, curving smile and her careless taking of center stage. “Most of the company is already gone.”

  “They didn’t interest me.” She stared into his eyes from under her massive lashes. They looked real, but could have been plant-symbiotes—epiphytes cemented to eyelids.

  The funny feeling in Horatio’s stomach was back; he was acting, and he had to be convincing. In three days of rehearsal, none of the Teks had spoken to him. This was his first conversation, as an android, with a human.

  Gently but firmly she tapped his chin with a finger. “Don’t be shy.”

  “I don’t mean to be shy,” he said in a controlled voice. “What can I can do for you?”

  She smiled crookedly. “Learn my name, darling. It ought to be on a theater program somewhere. Paulette Gordon.” She grasped his hand firmly and pumped three times. Her breasts jiggled.

  He said automatically. “I’m Horatio.”

  “No, really?” She watched him blush. “I’m sorry I called you a robot. Is it an insult?”

  “Just a distinction. Androids are biotek.” He guided her hand onto his forearm, moved her fingers to pinch his skin. “Underneath we’re partly robot—for now at least—but on the surface—”

  “Amazing,” she yawned, then looked alert. “I do want something.”

  “What?”

  She said firmly, plopping cross-legged on the stage, “Do ‘the cloud-capp’d tow’rs.’”

  “What?”

  “Do ‘the cloud-capp’d tow’rs.’ My favorite speech from The Tempest. Can you?”

  He did know a little of it. “I hadn’t thought I’d ever perform it—”

  “Of course not, darling.” She looked pleased and stopped tapping her foot. “I thought of it for you.” She waved a hand; Horatio realized that she was directing him. “Try.”

  He moved downstage and said in Prospero’s aged, subdued voice, “The cloud-capp’d tow’rs—”

  “No, no, no. Jesus—and who the hell talks about him any more, darling. That was awful. You’ve made me just livid.” But she seemed delighted, not angry. “Sit. Here. Come.” She patted the stage.

  He sat, half-expecting a biscuit for obedience. She leaped forward. “Watch how it should be done.”

  She chanted with throbbing self-pity:

  “The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,

  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

  And like this insubstantial pageant faded

  Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

  As dreams are made on; and our little life

  Is rounded with a sleep.”

  Horatio, watching her, remembered a moment when he was twelve. A products outlet for Access, formerly a shopping mall, sponsored a cheap self-simula booth. He took his School Access money and did a three-minute rendition of the Brando soliloquy from the new simula of On the Waterfront.

  “I coulda been something,” he mumbled, his tongue halfway down his own throat to ape Brando. “I coulda been a contender.”

  When he’d come home with the chip, his mother had punished him, then, curious, she’d paid to load the simula on a rented wallscreen. He had never forgotten how foolish he had looked, growling and ranting; he had never forgotten how hard his mother had laughed at him.

  * * * * *

  Paulette bowed low. Horatio, back in the present, applauded—and she did look lovely: flushed, poised, completely uncontrolled but wonderfully alive. He wished that, years ago when he was like that, they could have met.

  She straightened. “How was I?” But she was sure she was wonderful.

  “Like nothing I’ve ever heard.” True enough, Horatio thought; no one else would dare be that affected.

  She straightened her bangs, which had tangled as she bowed. “Of course you’ve never heard anything like me—I’m an actress. A human actress.”

  “Like nothing I’ve ever seen.” Horatio added dubiously, “Not that I’ve been alive very long.”

  “Then you don’t know how good I was?”

  “I can’t be sure.”

  She bounded back to him. “Take my word for it: I was marvelous. Magnificent. Breathtaking.” She spun around on stage, arms stretched; she’d had wine or chemstim earlier in the evening.

  He wondered where, in a passive world, someone as passionately self-assured had come from—or if she merely acted self-assured. He also wondered, with a tight feeling in his chest, if he had finally met the one other person in the world who loved acting.

  But did she really? He said, “You left out the important part of the Tempest speech.”

  “I did not. What important part?”

  “The part that says what happened to all the live theaters, years ago.” He closed his eyes.

  “Our revels now are ended.

  These our actors (as I foretold you)

  Were all spirits, and are melted into air,

  Into thin air—”

  She looked upset. “Stop that. Stop.”

  He did. “They tell me it’s what really happened.”

  “It’s only temporary. Sure, maybe now everyone on film is a simuloid—sorry, old term—a simula, and everyone in this theater is an android. And this is the only theater. But there’ll be human actors again.” She put her hands back on her hips and braced for a fight. “And I’ll be one of them.”

  “Why?”

  “My God, you have to ask? My God,” she told the empty seats, “he has to ask.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “Because there’s nothing in the entire universe that I’ll ever do as well as this.” She added frankly, “Or that I’ll want as badly.”

  “How do you know about acting?” She was too young to have seen much live theater.

  “I’ve acted. I collect play chips, and musical comedies—if you know what they are—and film scripts, and I read from them in front of Access and in front of my friends,” she finished defensively.

  She went on, “Daddy offered to have a simula taken of me and audition it.”

  “Your father must believe in you,” he said. He must also be tremendously wealthy, he thought.

  She waved a hand, suddenly nervous. “He knows what I can do. He actually went ahead and chip-loaded part of me, but I told him not to waste the money. Nobody wants to see me when they’ve got all those dead stars in simula—and anyway,” but she was looking at the audience and not at Horatio, “it’s not seeing me that matters, it’s being me.

  “Or seeing them.” She hopped up and down. “A few years ago, I invited my oldest friends—” Horatio didn’t smile at her having oldest friends. “To a live party instead of Access. And I set up a new simula of Marya Zelnick, and everybody waited to see what she’d do.

  “And I stepped up beside her and acted.” She added shyly, “We did part of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. I played the girl.” She slumped. “I forgot. You couldn’t really know what I feel.”

  Horatio wanted to tell her how old he’d been when he’d read The Wild Duck. He wanted to explain how, at fifteen, he’d gotten a friend to read aloud, woodenly and disinterestedly, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream on a June night in a Chicago park. He wanted to tell her about tryi
ng out mustaches, and walks, and accents, and silly laughs and chilling screams, and about knowing there was no place for those things anymore—

  He thought about the murder investigation. “I can guess what you feel. I was made for acting.”

  She laughed and grabbed his hand. “I was made for acting, too. And someday when Gertrude or Ophelia breaks down, they’ll hire me here in a minute.”

  He thought of telling her that they’d only make another android, but it was too monstrous. He thought of telling her that the point of the Hamlet Troupe probably wasn’t acting at all, that acting was gone for good, that there would never be another live theater as long as there were simulas. He thought of telling her how he’d dreamed of acting since he was a kid, and had never met a single other person who—

  “Good luck,” he said.

  She hit his shoulder. “You don’t think I’ll do it.”

  “I know you’ll try.” He rubbed his shoulder. “I hope you make it.”

  “I’ve got to. If you could see how I’m living, like a starving actress in an actual garret—a deadwood apartment, if you can believe that, in the Greenhouse Pools—” She grabbed his hand. “Come on.”

  “Where?”

  “Take your cloak; it’s warm enough, and God knows you don’t look any crazier than the people I live around. They’re a Free Zone by themselves, and the place is too sordid and perfect to describe.”

  “I can’t just leave.”

  She looked at him narrowly. “All the others could, darling. Are you refusing?”

  “I have to check in before I go, on a system I can’t access from the stage.”

  She smiled crookedly. “Go check in with Mommy or whoever.” She walked confidently, or with assumed confidence, to the lobby doors.

  Horatio leaned into the hall. The lights came on. He pulled his head back into the niche of the backstage door; they went out. “Hamlet?” There was no response. “My lord?” Nothing. “I’m leaving with a human.”

  He wished he could ask Theater Access for advice. Paulette had a way to bypass theater security, and she had the money and the knowledge to make simulas. She could make a simula of a fat man walking mechanically and project it around herself—but why would she kill Capek?