The Ship Who Sang (18 page)

Prane looked so gay and alert that Helva glanced at Kurla, whose attitude would transmit a truer reflection of her patient's health. The girl was radiant, her eyes as bright as Prane's, her manner proud and confident. She managed a polite nod to Ansra, who smiled fixedly at everyone.

By contrast, Davo looked tired and thoughtful. He pushed immediately toward the sleeping
accommodations and meshed himself into a bunk.

Prane hovered in front of Helva. ‘I want to thank you, very much, for putting aside your personal preferences to undertake this venture. Chief Railly has assured me that you will have the topmost priority when you return.'

Helva did not have time to analyse why his words disturbed her, for the Orbital Station transmitted good luck and clearance. Chadress did the manual piloting – that was protocol – but Helva was so used to doing things herself it was hard to watch. Not that he was inept. Damn, damn, damn, she thought, glancing around the crowded cabin, wishing half her mind were busy on something routine, how had she let herself get talked into this?

The moment Chadress announced turnover and free-fall, Prane called a rehearsal. First he put the five men who had joined the ship planetside through the staging they had missed. They'd all worked in free-fall and they knew their roles. All they required was time to familiarize themselves with movements and the Nurse's voice issuing from the wall. Ansra, however, chose to be difficult about that. She undulated toward the director – whether to charm him or intimidate him was a question.

‘Really, Prane, I can project any emotion required of any capable actress, but to pretend an . . . an abstract voice is Juliet's Nurse is the end.
How can I play to a wall? And, how may I ask, can . . . Helva (it seemed to be difficult for Ansra to name her) acquire any ease in free-fall, when I understand she has never made any use of a body?'

‘My stage directions are perfectly clear and are printed in my circuitry. Therefore I cannot make a mistake. That is, as long as you are where Juliet is supposed to be,' Helva answered.

No one actually laughed aloud at the putdown. Ansra resumed her proper position, frowning, and chewing her lip.

However, her assertion that she could project any emotion required of any capable actress seemed to fall short of the mark in scenes with proper actors. Her Juliet remained wooden and inadequate. She did not take fire from Romeo's speeches, although how she could fail was beyond Helva's comprehension. The man was inspired . . . and inspiring.

Relieved now for many days of the press of gravity on his spongy bones, buoyed constantly by the success of every other aspect of this singular production, Prane exuded a vitality, an enthusiasm that was contagious. He was apparently indefatigable.

As he was setting scene iv of Act I with himself, Mercutio, Benvolio and others doubling up as maskers and torchbearers, Mercutio finished his speech:

‘. . . Come, we burn daylight, ho!'

The scene had been quick, bright exchanges,
the light-hearted nonsense of friends bound for a gay evening.

Mercutio repeated his line. Hastily, Helva remembered she doubled as prompter and found the place.

‘“Nay, that's not so,”' she read out.

Silence met this attempt, so she, too, repeated the line.

‘We know the line,' Prane said as this additional pause lengthened conspicuously. ‘Who says it?'

Helva gulped. ‘You do.'

For a moment a terrible expression haunted his eyes. Then he burst out laughing and the terror was gone. ‘'Tis always the littlest line that escapes,' and he briskly cued Mercutio.

That night, as everyone slept, Prane was restless. Shamelessly, Helva turned up the volume in the cabin he shared with five other men. He was repeating scene iv over and over. Then he lay silent. Helva thought he slept, until she saw his right hand slowly creep to his belt, carefully extract a small pill from the waistband fabric of his shipsuit. With a gesture counterfeiting a random sleepy movement, the pill reached his mouth.

The secretiveness of his action, added to the intense rehearsal of that scene, gave Helva a tragic insight to the Solar. He
was
an addict, in the most horrifying degree: mindtrap, listed as harmless in the galactic pharmacopoeia, had become poisonous to him, fatal to mind and
body. And he knew it. Yet more devastating to Solar Prane was loss of memory and to prevent that, he courted self-destruction.

Except for Ansra, rehearsals proceeded well. How Prane kept his temper with such deliberate obstructionism, Helva did not know. Every scene the Solara played began to sag, lose fire, drop pace. But Prane did not react. And Ansra apparently gave up trying to goad him into an action no one could condone. She took to needling Kurla, a far more vulnerable personality.

Fortunately, Nia Tubb, the Lady Capulet, shared the pilot's cabin, which was the women's room. She was wise in the ways of human relations and if she said nothing to the point, she did buffer Kurla from Ansra's hostility. She also helped Kurla in her lines, and kept up a light-hearted monologue when the women were alone. But even she could see Ansra's tactics increasing the pressure on the sensitive, anxious medical attendant.

‘Honey, you have any
real
trouble with Colmer, you let me help, huh?' Nia Tubb said to Kurla one morning.

‘Thanks,' Kurla answered with a wan smile.

‘Say, just between the two of us, Prane's no addict, is he? He doesn't look like one and I've seen enough to know, but still—'

‘Solar Prane developed an adverse chemical reaction to long use of mindtrap.'

‘I always thought mindtrap was the most
harmless thing in the world. I've used it myself times without number.'

‘Ordinarily. But the Solar has been using it for over 70 years. A residue of the silicon content, which ought to have been flushed out of his system, has built up in his tissues. He also has a liquid retention problem and the diuretic originally prescribed combined unfavorably with the mindtrap residue, leaching potassium from his system in an unremediable process.'

‘What does that mean? He looks fine to me.'

Kurla's voice, dispassionately clinical, was more tragic than tears.

‘In low-grav conditions, in free-fall particularly, there is no strain on the skeleton and he's fine. But his bones are soft: a fall, a blow, any long period of heavy physical strain and he would . . . in effect . . . break up. And the silicon is gradually choking his vital organs to death.'

‘Replace 'em!'

Kurla shook her head. Nia patted her hand sympathetically. Helva interrupted them with a rehearsal call. And that was the worst rehearsal yet. Ansra's attitude had insidiously undermined the entire cast. Everyone was off; they blew their lines, forgot stage business: When Mercutio and Paris got into a fight that was not in the script, Prane called a halt.

‘We've gone stale. We'll take today off and tomorrow. Helva, break out the liquor rations. Nia and Kurla, would you be kind enough to see what surprises the galley might serve us? Helva,
have you some tri-casts of interest? We need to relate to the everyday worlds that we have forgotten, immersed as we have been in ancient England.'

Ansra stalked out of the main cabin, slamming the door to the women's quarters. Helva looked in to find her staring angrily into a mirror. It was disconcerting for Helva to watch her frustrated, brooding self-examination while Nia and Kurla chattered inconsequentialities in the galley.

Helva tried to be everywhere, keeping an ear out for any trouble . . . any more trouble, that is. Davo floated purposefully toward Prane. Since Helva had begun speaking only from the main cabin, she fostered the tendency for her passengers to forget she had ears and eyes everywhere in the ship.

‘You must realize by now, Prane,' Davo was saying, ‘that Ansra is determined to ruin this production. And she is succeeding admirably.'

Prane regarded his friend for a long moment, a slow smile beginning. ‘You've a solution?'

‘Let's put her off balance. Remember what we used to do on the long hauls on tour?'

‘Reshuffle all the parts?'

‘Exactly. Christ, we all know each other's lines and movements.'

Prane began to grin mischieviously. ‘And . . . let Helva be Juliet?'

‘No, Kurla is Juliet!' Davo returned Prane's surprised stare with a dead serious dare.

‘And Romeo?'

‘That part need not change,' Davo said evenly, then added in a light voice, ‘but I shall be Friar Lawrence and marry you two.'

Prane waited till everyone had eaten and was relaxed with Thracian beer. The announcement met with approval, raucous and bawdy.

‘I'll be Lady Capulet,' Escalus announced in a squeaky falsetto.

‘And I'll be Lady Montague,' said Friar Lawrence in a quavering contralto, reverting to his own normal bass to add, ‘always thought she was a wino.'

‘I'll be Escalus,' Helva volunteered in a voice so like the real actor's the man dropped his tankard.

‘You could be the whole damned play all by yourself,' Davo vowed, his voice far more slurred than it should be on Thracian beer. ‘There isn't one part
you
couldn't do.'

‘Really? In that case, I'll be the Nurse,' Ansra Colmer announced. ‘Then Helva can see how the part should be
played
.'

‘And Kurla will be Juliet,' Davo cried, his eyes on Ansra. ‘Set the stage, oh chorus. Places, everyone. Places.'

‘“Two households, both alike in dignity . . .”' Helva began promptly in a basso, sweeping everyone into the act before they had time for second thoughts.

Davo came on as Sampson, and Chadress, normally Lord Capulet, as Gregory, hamming
their lines and indulging in slapstick nonsense. Baltazar rolled on, as though drunk, slurring through the establishment of conflict between the two houses. Lines were rattled off, and actors bodily moved each other into proper stage position or deliberately upstaged the speaker.

When Escalus-Lady Capulet glided on in the company of Nurse Angelica, Ansra, with deliberate malice, dispensed with fun and
played
her part as she had not played Juliet. And somehow twisted her lines as Nurse to mean something entirely different. Her exit line: ‘Go girl, seek happy nights to happy days,' was barbed enough to make Escalus falter.

But then Juliet met Romeo at the feast, and Ansra's spitefulness backfired. For Prane was a different, tenderer Romeo, his voice trembled not with fatigue but with newfound love, gentle, protective, eager. And Kurla, her eyes equally discovering her lover, was Juliet; breathless, shy, daring, and precious. She blushed shyly as she said,

She turned her hands palms down on Romeo's, as he had so often directed Ansra only to have her mistime the words and action as to make them meaningless.

Romeo raised Juliet's hands on his, and the
ardor in his eyes, the answering joy in hers, made that little scene so tender that everyone was spellbound.

‘“Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purg'd,”' said Romeo in so soft a voice it seemed a faint echo, but it hung clearly until his lips met Juliet's in a kiss that was as devout an avowal as a shout.

Her role forgotten completely, Ansra flung herself forward as the two still embraced and were lost to their surroundings. And the proximity alarms twanged. They had arrived at their destination.

‘Now,' Chadress said to the actors, all seated in the main cabin, hastily cleared of all its party debris, ‘the transceivers were fitted to your head sizes so they will be quite comfortable. You all heard the reports from those survey ship members who used the first device. You know the transfer process is painless and easy. You think youself on the surface and there you are.'

‘How can you think yourself on a surface you've never seen?' Nia demanded, grimacing at the transceiver she was holding.

‘The nearest analogue would be the undersea scapes on Terra in the Carribean area, or the water world in Aldebaran. Or Vega IV. Imagine yourselves surrounded by seaweeds, all shapes and colors. Yes, the survey people repeatedly emphasized the enormous importance of color. The Corviki resemble a marine animal in the
class hydrozoa, sort of a large sac-like body with a complex collection of tendrils that may be nerve endings.'

‘Gawd, what a costume!' Nia Tubb muttered, shuddering.

‘It'll fit, I'm told.' Chadress grinned at her. ‘Now, Helva is our fail-safe. She's equipped with an automatic return relay. We've been warned not to remain too long in the Corviki environment.'

‘Why?' Ansra demanded in a bored voice.

‘The Corviki undoubtedly have good reason, but they did not say what. Now, Prane?'

The Solar rose, looked around at the entire cast. ‘We all know the importance of this unlikely exchange of Shakespeare for power. The Bard has been translated into every conceivable language, alien and humanoid, and somehow the essence of his plays has been understood by the most exotic, the most barbaric, the most sophisticated. There is no reason to suppose that Will Shakespeare hasn't got something to say to the Corviki . . . if we do the job wholeheartedly . . . or whatever our Corviki envelopes use for that Organ.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, curtain!' He sat down and donned his transceiver, settling back in the couch and relaxing completely. In a few seconds a light glowed across the rim of the transceiver.

‘If that's all there is to it,' Nia Tubb said, and pulled hers down on her head.

The others imitated her more or less simultaneously until only Chadress and Helva remained on board.

‘Check Prane,' Helva said.

‘He's all right as far as I can see. I'll see you down there, Helva.'

And he was gone. Helva had the uncanny notion that the new synapse leads were burning hot. But that was impossible. She willed herself to ascend. On the heels of the thought that this was the first time
she
had been outside a shell in her life, came a terrifying surge of primitive fear and then . . .