The Wizard of Karres

knowing it, but at that moment Thora had no doubt at all that her boss was in the direct line of descent from the Daals of Uldune who had committed far worse crimes than even such as Nairdoo Sheyan.

'The reward specifies 'dead or alive,' ' he murmured. 'Make that 'dead,' if you please. The Sheyan creature has been threatening certain, ah, interests of mine. And I'm not in a charitable mood.'

 

 

CHAPTER 14

'Who's that?' Pausert asked Mannicholo sharply, pointing to a sausage vendor strolling among the audience. The man looked perfectly ordinary, with his hotbox of sausages slung over his shoulders and not a sign of manner, costume, or oddity to mark him. That was suspicious, for it meant he was too ordinary to be one of Himbo Petey's people.

'Eh? Oh. Local. Petey has all the real food here sold and made by locals.'

'Locals? But I thought we sold—'

Mannicholo shook his head vigorously, so that his facial colors swirled like oil on the water. 'All we sell are CarniSnax, that come straight out of the replicators. CarniCorn, CarniFluff, CarniPops, CarniCreme, CarniBars, CarniBites, and CarniSlurps. Fat, sugar, starch, water and salt, is all that's in them; one hundred percent artificially flavored and nutritionally null, packed with enough preservatives that if you pick up a Pak in a thousand years it still won't have passed its sell-by date. The stuff's pure garbage but it's guaranteed not to poison any sapient in the known universe. Real food gets sold by the locals and we take a cut. That way we don't have to store and cook real food for more than the crew, and if anybody gets poisoned, or wants to claim he has been, he has to take it up with one of his own people.'

Pausert eyed the vendor with disfavor. It was going to be hard enough to try and pick out possible crooks, ISS agents, freelance spies and piratical agents out of the crowd as it was. With a lot of loose locals being given carte blanche to run around backstage for the purpose of selling sausage rolls and funnel cakes, it was going to be even harder. You could hide almost any sort of spying mechanism in one of those food boxes! And you could hide weapons, too.

He tried to convey his concern to the rest of the Venture's crew as they waited for the stagehands to set things up for a final dress rehearsal. Hulik just gave him an opaque look, saying, 'It will be just as hard for any spies to find out who we are, Captain. We are part of the showboat family now, and they are notoriously close mouthed around strangers, especially when someone has come around asking questions about one of their own.'

Hantis said nothing. 'I can smell a spy a mile away,' growled Pul. 'Don't you worry about that.'

The Leewit looked positively bored. 'We're smarter than they are,' she said, with the absolute confidence of a seven-year-old Mistress of the Universe. 'They haven't caught us before, and they won't now.'

Pausert decided not to remind her that being encased in ferroplast didn't fall in with his definition of 'not being caught.'

Goth, at least, looked as worried as he felt. 'I don't like it either,' she admitted. 'But we can't keep them off the ship. We'll just have to be careful.'

That didn't fit his definition of a solution either. Pausert worried about it so much that all through rehearsal, he kept missing cues and his marks. He'd have thought that Richard Cravan would be so angry with him that he'd be fired from the thespians outright—but nothing whatsoever was said.

In fact, Cravan looked guardedly pleased. Pausert couldn't figure out why, and said so aloud.

Alton Morrisey, the male romantic lead who was playing Romeo to Hulik's Juliet, looked up from his script. 'Bad dress, good opening,' he said abruptly.

It took Pausert a moment to decipher that. He decided that it must be another of the thespians' superstitions, like never whistling in the theater and always referring to Macbeth as 'The Scottish Play' and Richard the Third as 'Dick Three-Eyes.' Presumably, it meant that a bad dress rehearsal resulted in a good opening performance. He hoped that was right, although for someone like himself who had been trained as a space pilot, the logic was downright bizarre.

But Pausert decided not to worry about it. He was feeling more relaxed, anyway, since now that every single one of them was in stage makeup most of the time he realized that they'd inadvertently stumbled across an splendid antispy technique. He was certain that not even his own mother would recognize him, done up in a foxy- colored wig as Mercutio.

Nevertheless, despite all of his other worries, the moment the curtain came up, somehow he forgot all of them. He watched raptly from the wings as Sampson and Gregory (who were Capulet servants) complained that they would not put up with insults from the Montague family. Then Abram and Balthasar (Montague servants) appeared and the four started quarreling. Benvolio (Lord Montague's nephew) appeared and tried to break up the quarrel, but Tybalt (Lady Capulet's nephew) appeared and picked a fight with Benvolio.

That was Pausert's first cue. Himbo Petey had enforced his will on Richard Cravan at least to this extent: he insisted on melees of the largest possible size whenever there was supposed to be a sword fight. So, the captain rushed onstage to join the action.

Here, Richard Cravan's cleverness showed itself. Every pair of fighters had only four moves to memorize: two attacks and two parries. The secret was that each pair had different combinations, so that it looked like an amazingly complex and very realistic fight. In fact, out in the audience, Pausert could hear cheering and bets being placed. Every actor who knew how to handle a sword was doing so—everyone else was waving or wielding foam batons disguised as clubs or singlesticks. Even Goth, the Leewit, and Hantis were doing so, while Pul put in his bit by lunging into the melee and—carefully!—seizing the leg of one of the actors. It was a well- rehearsed bit of business. Pul dragged the fellow offstage while he screamed at the top of his lungs.

At length, officers tried to break up the fight, even while Lord Capulet (played by Cravan) and Lord Montague (played by Himbo Petey) began to fight one another. The Prince of Verona finally appeared and stopped the fighting, proclaiming sentences of death to any that dared to break the peace of the city again.

Pausert could then retire from the stage with everyone else—and to his amazement, he found himself shaking with excitement. The cheers of the crowd had acted on him like a drug, and it was a drug he wanted more of!

But he could not have any just then, for the curtain fell and came back up on Montague's house, and there were two more scenes before his next entrance in Scene Four.

He got to observe Hulik, then, in her first real stage appearance as Juliet. Even though he had watched her in rehearsals, her full performance left him blinking. He would have sworn on his life that she was hardly more than a young girl, in her mid-teens at most. Maybe some of that was makeup, but the rest was acting. He'd seen her act the seductress often enough, but it was a revelation to see her play the complete innocent, and do so convincingly.

Her performance left him vowing to make his Mercutio alive and real to those people out there. So when he swaggered onstage, he threw himself into his part with everything he had.

He had to stay onstage, in the background, for the rest of the party scene. And, great Patham, if he wasn't half in love with 'young Juliet' himself before it was over. And he knew her!

When he finally made his exit, to gratifying applause, he felt almost drunk. It was wonderful! Wonderful! Who would have guessed that he had the makings of an actor in him? Who would have guessed that it was so intensely satisfying? He began to wonder if perhaps when this was all over, maybe he could come back to the Petey B and resume his place here. . . .

And that was when he relled vatch.

'Oh no—' he breathed, and looked frantically about for it.

But it was not his nemesis, the little silver-eyed one. It was another big one, and he didn't even wait for it to announce itself or start in on mischief. While Juliet and Romeo played out their first love scene, he closed his eyes and made klatha hooks and tore into the thing.

OW! STOP! OW! It shouted at him, shocked and dismayed. STOP IT, DREAM THING! THIS IS MY DREAM! STOP IT RIGHT NOW!

Go away! he thought back at it, This isn't your dream, it's mine, and I don't want you in it.

OW! SPOILSPORT! the vatch whined. VICIOUS BEAST! SEE IF I EVER DREAM ABOUT YOU AGAIN!