There were a couple of others about my age in the Earth’s Men; Philp was one of them and a good friend. There were several young women in the troupe, including Aglaé, the best and most attractive Juliet and Rosalind I’ve ever seen: she was a year older than me and my choice for girlfriend, lover, and wife, but she never noticed me; Tooley was our age, but he primarily did basic maintenance engineering on the Muse, although he could hold a spear in a crowd scene if pressed to.
Kemp and Burbank were the two real leaders of the troupe, along with Kemp’s wife (and Burbank’s lover) Condella, whom everyone secretly, and never affectionately, referred to as “the Cunt.” I never learned how the nickname got started—some say it was her French accent as Catherine talking to her maid in Henry V—but other and less kind guesses would probably have been equally accurate.
Kemp had always been a clown in the most honorable sense of the word: a young arbeiter comic actor and improviser when he was chosen for the Earth’s Men by Burbank’s father, the former leader of the troupe, more than fifty years earlier. One of Kemp’s specialties was Falstaff although he’d lost weight as he aged, so he now had to wear a special suit fitted out with padding whenever he played Sir John. He was a brilliant Falstaff, but he was even more brilliant—frighteningly so—as Lear. If Kemp had had his way, we would have performed The Tragedy of King Lear for every second performance.
Burbank had the weight for Falstaff but not the comic timing, and since he was in his early fifties SEY, was not quite old enough—nor impressive enough in personality—to make an adequate Lear. Yet he was now too old to play Hamlet, the role his father had owned and in which this younger Burbank had also excelled. There was something about the Prince’s dithering and indecisiveness and self-pity that perfectly fit Burbank. Still, it was a frustrating time for Burbank and he marked it by getting hammier and hammier in the roles Kemp allowed him and by screwing Kemp’s much younger wife every chance he got.
Alleyn was our young Hamlet now and a wonderful one at that, especially when set against Burbank’s Claudius and Kemp’s Polonius. For villains we had Heminges. Kemp once said to me after a few drinks that our real Heminges out-Iagoes Iago on and off the stage. He also said that he wished that Heminges had Richard III’s hump and personality just so things would be more peaceful aboard the Muse.
Coeke was our Othello and was perfect in the role for more reasons than his skin color. Recca, especially adept at playing Kate the Shrew, was Heminges’s wife and Coeke’s mistress—when she felt like it—and her easy infidelity had done little in recent years to improve Heminges’s personality.
Heminges was also our only revolutionary.
I should explain that.
There were a few men or women out of the billions scattered among the Archon and other alien stars who believed that humans should revolt, throw off the yoke of the Archons and reestablish the “human era.” As if that were possible. They were all cranks and malcontents like Heminges.
I was about fifteen and we were in transit in the Pleroma when I first heard Heminges mutter his suicidal sedition.
“How could we possibly ‘rise up’ against the Archons?” I asked. “Humans have no weapons.”
Heminges had given me his Iago smile. “We’re in the most powerful weapon left to our species, young Master Wilbr.”
“The Muse?” I said stupidly. “How could the Muse be a weapon?”
Heminges had shaken his handsome head in something like disgust. “The touring ships are the last artifacts left from the human age of greatness,” he hissed at me. “Think of it, Wilbr…three fusion reactors, a fusion engine that used to move our ancestors around the Earth’s solar system in days and which the Archon cabiri bots… and Tooley… keep tuned for us. Why, the flame tail from this ship is three miles long during early atmosphere entry.”
The words had made me cold all through. “Use the Muse as a weapon?” I said. “That’s…” I had no words for it. “The Archons would catch us and put us in a pain synthesizer for the rest of our lives.” I assumed this last statement would put an end to the discussion.
Kemp had told me about the Archons’ pain synthesizers the first months I’d been with the troupe. The lowest of the four tiers of alien races rarely deigned to deal with us, but when dole or arbeiter disappointed them or disobeyed them in any way, the Archons dropped the hapless people into a pain synthesizer and kept them alive for extra decades. The settings on the synthesizers were reputed to include such pleasures as “crushed testicle” or “hot poker up the anus” or “blade through eyeball”… and the pain never ended. Drugs in the synthesizer soup kept the prisoner awake and suffering for long decades. And, Kemp had whispered to me, the first thing the Archons do to someone going into the pain synthesizer is to remove their tongue and vocal cords so they cannot scream.
Heminges laughed. “To punish us, the Archon would have to be alive. And so would we. Three fusion reactors make for a very nice bomb, young Master Wilbr.”
That thought had kept me awake for weeks, but when I asked Tooley, who was apprenticing with Yerick who was then the ship’s engineer, if such a thing were possible, he told me that it wasn’t—really—that the reactors could melt and that would be messy, but that they couldn’t be turned into what he called “a fusion bomb.” Not really. Besides, Tooley said in his friendly lisp, the Archons had long since retrofitted Muse with so many of their own posttech safeguards and monitors that no amount of mere human tinkering could cause the reactors to go critical.
“What would we do if we…did…somehow attack the Archons?” I asked Heminges when I was fifteen. “Where would we go? Humans can’t transit the Pleroma…only Abraxas can do that, praise be unto His name, and He shares those sacred secrets only with the Demiurgos, Poimen, and Archons. We’d be stranded forever in whatever star system we’d started the revolt in.”
Heminges had only snorted at that and turned his attention back to his ale.
Still… all these years later…just the thought of losing the Muse made me shiver. She was home to me. She was the only home I’d known in the past eleven SEY and I fully expected to call her home for another fifty SEY until it was time for me to be carted back to Earth on a funeral barge.
We were performing Much Ado About Nothing and because I was playing Balthasar, Don Pedro’s attendant, I didn’t have to go with the supernumeraries as they went out to drum up business with the Circus Parade.
There were twenty cabiri for every human from our troupe, but the parade is hard to ignore. Those not preparing for major roles in Much Ado and our huge metal spiders made their way to the dole city on the higher ridges before the cabiri activated their holograms and my friends already in costume began blowing their horns and shouting and singing into their loudhailers.
Only a few doles joined the procession then—they rarely turn out for the Circus Parade—but by the time the line of brightly costumed actors and the procession of free-roaming elephants with red streamers, tigers, dromedaries carrying monkeys wearing fezzes, wolves in purple robes, and even some leaping dolphins got halfway through the arbeiter city, there were several hundred people following them back to the Muse.
More trumpets and announcements began blaring from the ship herself. The lower hull is always part of the stage and backdrop, of course, and this night the Muse extruded her lower balconies and catwalks and rows of spots and other lights beneath the tent just minutes before the crowd arrived. Holograms and smart paint became the fields and forests and hilltop manse of Leonato while we players in the wings hurried with our last costume and makeup preparations.